She cried: 

“It’s no good your going on in that strain.  You can’t leave me alone with all this house on my shoulders, and so that’s flat.”

“Who wants to leave you all alone in the house?  You can go and stay at Ladderedge, children and nurse and all.”  This scheme presented itself to him as he spoke.

“Of course I can’t!  We can’t go and plant ourselves on people like that.  Besides—­”

“Can’t you?  You’ll see!”

He caught her eye.  Why was he being so brutal to her?  What conceivable purpose was served by this harshness?  He perceived that his nerves were overstrung.  And in a swift rush of insight he saw the whole situation from her point of view.  She was exhausted by gestation; she lived in a world distorted.  Could she help her temperament?  She was in the gravest need of his support; and he was an ass, a blundering fool.  His severity melted within him, and secretly he became tender as only a man can be.

“You silly girl!” he said, slightly modifying his voice, taking care not to disclose all at once the change in his mood.

“You silly girl!  Can’t you see they’ll be so proud to have you they won’t be able to contain themselves?  They’ll turn the whole place upside-down for you.  I know them.  They’ll pretend it’s nothing, but mother won’t sleep at night for thinking how to arrange things for the best, and as for my cuckoo of an uncle, if you notice something funny about your feet, it’ll be the esteemed alderman licking your boots.  You’ll have the time of your life.  In fact they’ll ruin your character for you.  There’ll be no holding you afterwards.”

She did not smile, but her eyes smiled.  He had got the better of her.  He had been cleverer than she was.  She was beaten.

“But we shall have no money.”

“Read the letter, child.  I’m not a fool.”

“I know you’re not a fool.  No one knows that better than me.”

He went on: 

“And what’s uncle’s money for, if it comes to that?”

“But we can’t spunge on them like that!”

“Spunge be dashed!  What’s money for?  It’s no good till it’s spent.  If he can’t spend it on us, who can he spend it on?  He always makes out he’s fiendishly hard, but he’s the most generous idiot ever born.”

“Yes, you’re awfully like him.”

“I’m not.”

He was suddenly alive to the marvellous charm of the intimacy of the scene with his wife, in the early summer dawn, in the silent, enchanted house of sleepers, in the disorder of the heaped bedroom.  They were alone together, shameless in front of one another, and nobody knew or saw, or could ever know or see.  Their relations were unique, the resultant of long custom, of friction, of misunderstanding, of affection, of incomprehensible instincts, of destiny itself.  He thought:  “I have lived for this sensation, and it is worth living for.”

Without the slightest movement, she invited him with her strange eyes, and as she did so she was as mysterious as ever she had been.  He bent down responsively.  She put her hot, clammy hands on his shoulders, and kept his head at a little distance and looked through his eyes into his soul.  The letter had dropped to the floor.