Page:The Finer Grain (London, Methuen & Co., 1910).djvu/67

Rh feeling his way,—he used that expression to me; and again, I haven't to tell you, any more than he really had to tell me, that with Mora one has to sit tight. He puts on us, in short, the responsibility."

He had felt how more than ever her "done" yellow hair—done only in the sense of an elaborately unbecoming conformity to the spasmodic prescriptions, undulations, and inflations of the day, not in that of any departure from its pale straw-coloured truth,—was helped by her white invalidical shawl to intensify those reminders of their thin ideals, their bloodless immunity, their generally compromised and missed and forfeited frankness, that every other feature of their domestic scene had just been projecting for him. "Responsibility,—we responsible?" She gaped with the wonder of it.

"I mean that we should be, if anything were to happen by our trying to impose on her our view of her one redemption. I give it you for his own suggestion,—and thereby worth thinking of."

But Jane could take nothing in. "He suggests that he needn't marry her, and you agree with him? Pray, what is there left to 'happen,'" she went on before he could answer, "after her having happened so completely to disgrace herself?"

He turned his back a moment,—he had shortly before noticed a framed decoration, a "refined" Japanese thing, that gave accent, as he would have said, to the neatness of his mouse-grey wall, and that needed straightening. Those spare apprehensions