Page:The Finer Grain (London, Methuen & Co., 1910).djvu/133

Rh on that arrangement where do the difficulties come in?"

Jane looked at him a moment with wonderful eyes. "For me? They don't come in!" And she again turned her back on him.

It really tempted him to permit himself a certain impatience—which in fact he might have shown hadn't he by this time felt himself more intimately interested in Jane's own evolution than in Mrs Puddick's, or even, for the moment, in Mora's. That interest ministered to his art. "You must tell me at your convenience about yours, that is about your apparently feeling yourself now so beautifully able to sink yours. What I'm asking you about is his—if you've put them so at their ease."

"I haven't put them a bit at their ease!"—and she was at him with it again almost as in a glow of triumph.

He aimed at all possible blankness. "But surely, four hundred and fifty more a year—!"

"Four hundred and fifty more is nothing to her."

"Then why the deuce did she marry him for it?—since she apparently couldn't bring herself to without it."

"She didn't marry him that she herself should get my allowance,—she married him that he should."

At which Traffle had a bit genuinely to wonder. "It comes at any rate to the same if you pay it to her."

Nothing, it would seem, could possibly have had