a sudden vigour towards the photograph.

"From him?"

"From Douglas," she admitted, "from your cousin."

He took the photograph into his hand, looked at it for a moment, and
dashed it into the grate. The glass of the frame was shivered into a
hundred pieces. The girl only shrugged her shoulders. She was holding
herself in reserve. As for him, his eyes were hot, there was a dry
choking in his throat. He had passed through many weary and depressed
days, struggling always against the grinding monotony of life and his
surroundings. Now for the first time he felt that there was something
worse.

"What does it mean?" he asked once more.

She seemed almost to dilate as she answered him. Her feet were firmly
planted upon the ground. There was a new look in her face, a look of
decision. She was more or less a coward but she felt no fear. She even
leaned a little towards him and looked him in the face.

"It means," she pronounced slowly, "exactly what it seems to mean."

The words conveyed horrible things to him, but he was speechless. He
could only wait.

"You and I, Philip," she continued, "have been--well, I suppose we should
call it engaged--for three years. During those three years I have earned,
by disgusting and wearisome labour, just enough to keep me alive in a
world which has had nothing to offer me but ugliness and discomfort and
misery. You, as you admitted last time we met, have done no better. You
have lived in a garret and gone often hungry to bed. For three years this
has been going on. All that time I have waited for you to bring something
human, something reasonable, something warm into my life, and you have
failed. I have passed, in those three years, from twenty-three to
twenty-six. In three more I shall be in my thirtieth year--that is to
say, the best time of my life will have passed. You see, I have been
thinking, and I have had enough."

He stood quite dumb. The girl's newly-revealed personality seemed to fill
the room. He felt crowded out. She was, at that stage, absolutely
mistress of the situation.... She passed him carelessly by, flung herself
into the easy-chair and crossed her legs. As though he were looking at
some person in another world, he realized that she was wearing shoes of
shapely cut, and silk stockings.

"Our engagement," she went on, "was at first the dearest thing in life to
me. It could have been the most wonderful thing in life. I am only an
ordinary person with an ordinary