s without that little breathless
thrill of wonder and excitement. There wasn't one man at Earl's Court
that night who could compare with Ranny. He made them all look weedy,
flabby; pitiful, uninteresting things.

And then, all of a sudden (they were at the paygate), as she looked,
astonishment, grief, and anxiety appeared on Winny's face. Something had
dismayed her tenderness, dashed her joy. She had seen Ranny take out of
his waistcoat pocket gold--not ten shillings, but a whole sovereign. And
a dreadful fear awoke in her.

He was going to spend it all.

She knew it, something told her; she could see by the way he smacked it
down, careless like. And Winny couldn't bear it; she couldn't bear to
think that Ranny, who had pinched and scraped and done without things
for years, should go and throw away all that on her!

But anybody could see that he was going to do it, by the strange
excitement and abstraction in his eyes, by the way he gathered up the
change and took Winny by the arm and walked off with her. His eyes and
the close crook of his arm drawing her along with him in his course, the
slight leaning of his body toward hers as they went, his stride and the
set of his head proclaimed that he had got her, that she couldn't
escape, that he meant to go it, that he had the right to spend on her
more than he could possibly afford.

She could see what he was thinking. In one tremendous burst he was going
to make up to her now for all that she had missed. What was more, he was
going to rub it into her that he had the right to. She couldn't realize
their happiness as he did. They had been cheated out of it so long that
she couldn't believe in it, couldn't believe that it was actually in
their grasp, the shining, palpitating joy that for five years had been
dangled before them only to be jerked out of their hands. He wanted to
make her feel it; to make her taste and touch and handle the thing that
seemed impossible and yet was certain.

Ranny was intoxicated, he was reckless with certainty.

And Winny couldn't bear it. All the way up between the painted walls she
was trying to think what she could do to prevent his spending a whole
sovereign. She knew that it was no use fighting Ranny. The more she hung
on to him to stop him, the more Ranny would struggle and break loose.
Persuasion was no good. The more she reasoned, the more determined he
would be to spend that sovereign, and the more ways he would find to
spend it.