osser--to let her marry him when he had no feeling to offer her but
such indifference as marriage deepens to disgust, or such disgust as
it tones down into indifference. Would he go on shuddering and wincing
as he had shuddered and winced to-day? Passion that might have
condoned her failings was out of the question; but would it be
possible to keep up the decent appearance of respect?

And yet he was going to marry her.

That was impressed on him by Flossie's voice saying that if he
wouldn't decide which of those two rooms was to be _their_ room, she
must. Because the men wanted to put up the bedstead.

It was an intimation that he was bound to her, not by any fine ties of
feeling or of honour, but by a stout unbreakable chain of material
facts. He looked out of the window. The vans were unloading in the
street. It seemed to him that there was something almost grossly
compromising in the wash-stand, dumped down there in the garden; and
as the bedstead was being borne into the house in portions,
reverentially, processionally, he surrendered before that supreme
symbol of finality. As he had made his bed, he must lie; even if it
was a brass bed with mother-o'-pearl ornaments; and he refused to
listen to the inner voice which suggested that the bed was not made
yet, it was not even paid for, and that he would be a fool to lie on
it. He turned sad eyes on the little woman so flushed and eager over
her packages. He had committed himself more deeply with every purchase
they had made that day. How carefully he had laboured at his own
destruction.

He had gone so far with these absurd reflections, that when Flossie
exclaimed, "There, after all I've forgotten the kitchen hammer," his
nerves relaxed their tension, and he experienced a sense of momentary
but divine release. And when she insisted on repairing her oversight
as they went back, he felt that the kitchen hammer had clinched the
matter; and that if only they had not bought it he might yet be free.

There was something in the Beaver's building, after all.

CHAPTER LIX

He did not appear that evening, not even to listen to Lucia's music,
for his misery was heavy upon him. Mercifully, he was able to forget
it for a while in attending to the work that waited for him; an
article for _The Planet_ to be written; proofs to correct and
manuscripts to look through for _Metropolis_; all neglected till the
last possible moment, which moment had now come. For once he r