Am
I a baby only, Grizel?"

"I think it is childish of you," she replied, "to say you are a
brute."

"There is not to be even that satisfaction left to me! You are hard on
me, Grizel."

"I am trying to help you. How can you be angry with me?"

"The instinct of self-preservation, I suppose. I see myself dwindling
so rapidly under your treatment that soon there will be nothing of me
left."

It was said cruelly, for he knew that the one thing Grizel could not
bear now was the implication that she saw his faults only. She always
went down under that blow with pitiful surrender, showing the woman
suddenly, as if under a physical knouting.

He apologized contritely. "But, after all, it proves my case," he
said, "for I could not hurt you in this way, Grizel, if I were not a
pretty well-grown specimen of a monster."

"Don't," she said; but she did not seek to help him by drawing him
away to other subjects, which would have been his way. "What is there
monstrous," she asked, "in your being so good to Elspeth? It is very
kind of you to give her all these things."

"Especially when by rights they are yours, Grizel!"

"No, not when you did not want to give them to me."

He dared say nothing to that; there were some matters on which he must
not contradict Grizel now.

"It is nice of you," she said, "not to complain, though Elspeth is
deserting you. It must have been a blow."

"You and I only know why," he answered. "But for her, Grizel, I might
be whining sentiment to you at this moment."

"That," she said, "would be the monstrous thing."

"And it is not monstrous, I suppose, that I should let Gemmell press
my hand under the conviction that, after all, I am a trump."

"You don't pose as one."

"That makes them think the more highly of me! Nothing monstrous,
Grizel, in my standing quietly by while you are showing Elspeth how to
furnish her house--I, who know why you have the subject at your
finger-tips!"

For Grizel had given all her sweet ideas to Elspeth. Heigh-ho! how she
had guarded them once, confiding them half reluctantly even to Tommy;
half reluctantly, that is, at the start, because they were her very
own, but once she was embarked on the subject talking with such
rapture that every minute or two he had to beg her to be calm. She was
the first person in that part of the world to think that old furniture
need not be kept in the dark corners, and she knew where there was an
oak bedstead that was looked