Page:Lost Ecstasy (1927).pdf/232

 "My own. I have so many at home, and I need them, Tom."

"Part of your wedding clothes, you mean?"

"I can't see what difference that would make. After all, I'm married to you."

"That's just where you and I differ," he said, white to the lips. "You are married to me, and I dress my wife or she goes naked. I'm owing the Dowling family nothing."

He had never seen her cry, but she cried then, first quietly, then in long-drawn gasping sobs that he could do nothing to quiet. All her loneliness and terror, her actual fear of this undisciplined and relentless side of him, rose to add to her wretchedness. She flung herself on the bed in complete abandonment to it. When he came over and sat down beside her she drew away from him, and miserable as he was he had to wait until her sobs began to die away.

"Do you hate me like that, girl?"

"It's not hate. I think I'm afraid of you."

If she had struck him he could not have been more astounded.

"Afraid of me! My God!"

Had she been a little older, a little wiser, she would have met him half-way then, but although he humbled himself before her, confessed his weakness and his unhappiness, made his young and passionate love to her in his own inarticulate fashion, she remained aloof after that for a day or two. She never sent to Nora for the clothes.

Their small supply of money was dwindling, too. True, Kay still had Bessie's check, but after that quarrel she dared not mention it to Tom. And to the heat was added the discomfort of a continuing drought. Dust blew into her windows and covered the shabby furniture in the room; the pastures were baked hard in the sun, and sandy clouds rose from under the cattle's feet and hovered over them as they moved restlessly; the wheat burned in the fields, and the mountains day after day lifted their heads into a blue and cloudless sky. Anxiety began to be widespread. There was talk among the cattlemen of early shipping, to get out from under, for a summer drought followed by a long hard winter meant ruin.