Page:The Outcry (London, Methuen & Co., 1911).djvu/287

Rh was qualified by tact. "Ah, darling, as dreadful as that?"

He could but view the possibility with dark resentment. "It lets us so down—from what we've always been and done; so down, down, down that I'm amazed you don't feel it!"

"Oh, I feel there's still plenty to keep you up!" she soothingly laughed.

He seemed to consider this vague amount—which he apparently judged, however, not so vast as to provide for the whole yearning of his nature. "Well, my dear," he thus more blandly professed, "I shall need all the extra agrément that your affection can still supply."

If nothing could have been, on this, richer than her response, nothing could at the same time have been more pleasing than her modesty. "Ah, my affection, Theign, is, as I think you know, a fountain always at flood; but in any more worldly element than that I'm—as you've ever seen for yourself—a poor struggler with my own sad affairs, a broken reed; not a bit 'great,' as they used so finely to call it! You are great—with the natural sense of greatness and, for your supreme