e thinks, as her
keen, observant eyes sweep over him, he manages at present to live
and dress as a gentleman.

Those well-cut suits, those patent shoes and expensive cigarettes;
these things, she feels instinctively, must be preserved for him,
or any form of life would lose its charm.

At the same time, she must mention something that is not hopelessly
beyond him. She recalls her own two hundred; surely, at the least,
he must be making one.

"I can hardly say," she murmured at last, "because personally I
think one can live on so very little; but I suppose most people
would say--well, about three hundred pounds a year."

"Oh! three hundred a year," he says, stretching out his hand for
the tea-cup on a low table beside him. The tea has grown cold in
the discussion of abstract questions. He takes the cup and sits
down deliberately in the corner of the couch opposite her, and
stirs the tea slowly.

"How much is that a week? Five pounds fifteen, isn't it? Well, now,
go on, see what you can make of it. Your house--the smallest--and
servants--"

"House and servants!" interrupts the girl, "but why have a house
and servants at all?"

"I don't know," he rejoins curtly, "because the girl generally
expects those things when she marries."

"Not all girls," she says, and one seems to hear the smile with
which she says it in her voice.

"You mean rooms?" he says quickly, with a gleam of pleasure
breaking for a moment across his face.

"Well--say rooms--you would want three--thirty shillings, I
suppose, at the least, and then another thirty for board. That
leaves two fifteen for everything else."

"Surely that's a good deal."

"Oh, I don't know; think of one's clothes," and Stephen stares
moodily into the fire, with a pricking recollection of a tailor's
bill for twenty odd in his drawer at home now.

Then, to remove the impression of selfish extravagance he feels he
may have given, he adds:

"And a man wants to give his wife some amusement, and three hundred
a year leaves nothing for that."

"Amusement!" the girl repeats, starting up and standing upright,
with one elbow just touching the mantelpiece, and the firelight
flooding her figure from the slim waist downwards. "What amusement
does a woman want if she is in love with the man she is living
with? The man himself is her amusement! To watch him when he is
occupied, to wait for him when he is away, to nurse him when he is
ill--that is her amusement: she does no