have avoided even considering them before. Shall I tell you why? Because
I didn't want to face the temptation they might bring with them. I always
knew what would happen if escape became hopeless. It's the ugliness I
can't stand--the ugliness of cheap food, cheap clothes, uncomfortable
furniture, coarse voices, coarse friends if I would have them. How do you
suppose I have lived here these last three years, a teacher in the
national schools? Look up and down this long, dreary street, at the names
above the shops, at the villas in which the tradespeople live, and ask
yourself where my friends were to come from? The clergyman, perhaps? He
is over seventy, a widower, and he never comes near the place. Why, I'd
have been content to have been patronized if there had been anyone here
to do it, who wore the right sort of clothes and said the right sort of
thing in the right tone. But the others--well, that's done with."

He remained curiously dumb. His eyes were fixed upon the fragments of the
photograph in the grate. In a corner of the room an old-fashioned clock
ticked wheezily. A lump of coal fell out on the hearth, which she
replaced mechanically with her foot. His silence seemed to irritate and
perplex her. She looked away from him, drew her chair a little closer
to the fire, and sat with her head resting upon her hands. Her tone had
become almost meditative.

"I knew that this would come one day," she went on. "Why don't you speak
and get it over? Are you waiting to clothe your phrases? Are you afraid
of the naked words? I'm not. Let me hear them. Don't be more melodramatic
than you can help because, as you know, I am cursed with a sense of
humour, but don't stand there saying nothing."

He raised his eyes and looked at her in silence, an alternative which she
found it hard to endure. Then, after a moment's shivering recoil into her