Page:Glimpses of the Moon (Wharton 1922).djvu/169

Rh She stumbled over the word, remembering how Nick had always winced at it. But Strefford did not seem to notice her, and she hurried on, unfolding in short awkward sentences the avowal of their pecuniary difficulties, and of Nick's inability to understand that, to keep on with the kind of life they were leading, one had to put up with things accept favours.

"Borrow money, you mean?"

"Well—yes; and all the rest." No—decidedly she could not reveal to Strefford the episode of Ellie's letters. "Nick suddenly felt, I suppose, that he couldn't stand it," she continued; "and instead of asking me to try—to try to live differently, go off somewhere with him and live, like work-people, in two rooms, without a servant, as I was ready to do; well, instead he wrote me that it had all been a mistake from the beginning, that we couldn't keep it up, and had better recognize the fact; and he went off on the Hickses' yacht. The last evening that you were in Venice—the day he didn't come back to dinner—he had gone off to Genoa to meet them. I suppose he intends to marry Coral."

Strefford received this in silence. "Well—it was your bargain, wasn't it?" he said at length.

"Yes; but—"

"Exactly: I always told you so. You weren't ready to have him go yet—that's all."

She flushed to the forehead. "Oh, Streff—is it really all?"