“I suppose there is.  Very well.”

“You mean I’m to have it?”

“All right.”

“Thank you very much, dear,” said Marie very slowly after a while.

“You don’t seem in a particular hurry to say it.”

“Why should I say it?”

“What! when I’ve just arranged to give you six pound ten—­”

“To feed your daughter.”

“Oh, well—­”

“Anyway, I have said it.  I’ve said ‘Thank you very much,’ haven’t I?  Do you want me to show more gratitude?”

“It beats me to think what’s come over women.”

They sat on either side of their hearth looking at one another in unconcealed bewilderment.

“If you cared to let me make out a budget, Osborn,” she said suddenly, “I think we could arrange it all better.  So much for everything, you know.”

“Oh, yes, I know!  I know all about it, thanks!  If you want to dole out my pocket-money, my dear, I’m off....  I’m completely off it!  No, thank you.  I’ll keep my hands on my own income.”

“I only meant—­”

“Women never seem satisfied,” said Osborn wrathfully.

As he looked at her sitting there, thin and fair and reserved as she never used to be, with the sheen of her glossy hair almost vanished, and all of her pretty insouciance gone, he saw no more the gay girl, the wifely comrade, whom he had married.  In her place sat the immemorial hag, the married man’s bane, the blood-sucker, the enemy, the asker.

She had taken from him a sum equivalent to twice his weekly tobacco-money.

The sacrifice of all his tobacco would not provide for that red and crumpled baby lying in its fine basket.  He took that as a comparison, with no intention of sacrificing his tobacco; but it just gave one the figures involved.

As if feeling through her reserve the gist of his thoughts, she smiled.

“Poor old Osborn!” she said.

“You can stretch an income, and stretch it,” said Osborn, “but it isn’t eternally elastic, you know.”

“Don’t I know it!”

“Well, all I ask you to do,” said Osborn, “is to remember it.”

Then life went round as before, except that a great anxiety as to meeting the weekly bills fell upon Marie.  Sometimes they were a shilling up and sometimes a shilling down.  The day when the greasy books fell through the letter-box into the hall was a day to add a grey hair to the brightest head.

With two babies to dress, she rose earlier; she swept and dusted and cooked quicker; she sent Osborn off to his work as punctually as before; she wheeled two infants instead of one out in the grey perambulator to the open-air market.  And there her bargaining became sharp, thin and shrewish.  She fought the merchants smartly, and sometimes she won and sometimes they.  During the day Grannie Amber usually came in and lent a hand about the babies’ bedtime.  At 6.30 Osborn came home, a little peevish until after dinner.  After dinner he went out again if the new baby cried or if anything went wrong.  Once a quarter the demand for the rent came upon him like a fresh blow; once a month he paid the furniture instalment; once a week he gave up, like life-blood, thirty-two and sixpence to her whose palm was always ready.