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In the Year of Jubilee
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‘It is the pleasant custom of wives to make a husband uncomfortable if he comes late.’
‘Then I am no true wife!’ laughed Nancy.
‘Something much better,’ Tarrant muttered, as he threw off his overcoat.
He began to talk of ordinary affairs, and nearly half-an-hour elapsed before any mention was made of the event that had bettered their prospects. Nancy looked over a piece of his writing in an evening paper which he had brought; but she could not read it with attention. The paper fell to her lap, and she sat silent. Clearly, Tarrant would not be the first to speak of what was in both their minds. The clock ticked; the rain pattered without; the journalist smoked his pipe and looked thoughtfully at the ceiling.
‘Are you sorry,’ Nancy asked, ‘that I am no longer penniless?’
‘Ah—to be sure. We must speak of that. No, I’m not sorry. If I get run over, you and the boy—’
‘Can make ourselves comfortable, and forget you; to be sure. But for the present, and until you do get run over?’
‘You wish to make changes?’
‘Don’t you?’
‘In one or two respects, perhaps. But leave me out of the question. You have an income of your own to dispose of; nothing oppressively splendid, I suppose. What do you think of doing?’
‘What do you advise?’
‘No, no. Make your own suggestion.
Nancy smiled, hesitated, and said at length:
‘I think we ought to take a house.’
‘In London?’
‘That’s as you wish.’
‘Not at all. As you wish. Do you want society?’
‘In moderation. And first of all, yours.
Tarrant met her eyes.
‘Of my society, you have quite as much as is good for you,’ he answered amiably. ‘That you should wish for acquaintances, is reasonable enough. Take a house somewhere in the western suburbs. One or two men I know have decent wives, and you shall meet them.’
‘But you? You won’t live with me?’
‘You know my view of that matter.’
Nancy kept her eyes down, and reflected.
‘Will it be known to everybody that we don’t live together?’
‘Well,’ answered Tarrant, with a laugh, ‘by way of example, I should rather like it to be known; but as I know you wouldn’t like it, let the appearances be as ordinary as you please.’
Again Nancy reflected. She had a struggle with herself.
‘Just one question,’ she said at length. ‘Look me in the face. Are you—ever so little—ashamed of me?’
He regarded her steadily, smiling.
‘Not in the least.’
‘You were—you used to be?’
‘Before I knew you; and before I knew myself. When, in fact, you were a notable young lady of Camberwell, and I—’
He paused to puff at his pipe.
‘And you?’
‘A notable young fool of nowhere at all.’
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