reamed.

"But surely that must have been a long time ago!" she said in an
ordinary tone.

"Considering that I was twenty-two--yes!"

"Why did you leave her?"

"Why did I leave her? Because I had to! I'd gone as a clerk in a
solicitor's office in Torquay, and she was a client. She went mad about
me. I'm only telling you. She was a spinster. Had one of those big
houses high up on the hill behind the town!" He stopped; and then his
voice began to come again out of the deep shadow in the corner. "She
wanted me, and she got me. And she didn't care who knew! The wedding was
in the _Torquay Directory_. I told her I'd got no relations, and she was
jolly glad."

"But how old was she? Young?"

George sneered. "She'd never see thirty-six again, the day she was
married. Good-looking. Well-dressed. Very stylish and all that! Carried
me off my feet. Of course there was the money.... I may as well out with
it all while I'm about it! She made me an absolute present of four
thousand pounds. Insisted on doing it. I never asked. Of course I know I
married for money. It happens to youths sometimes just as it does to
girls. It may be disgusting, but not more disgusting for one than for
the other. Besides, I didn't realize it was a sale and purchase, at the
time!... Oh! And it lasted about ten days. I couldn't stand it, so I
told her so and chucked it. She began an action for restitution of
conjugal rights, but she soon tired of that. She wouldn't have her four
thousand back. Simply wouldn't! She was a terror, but I'll say that for
her. Well, I kept it. Four thousand pounds is a lot of brass. That's how
I started business in Turnhill, if you want to know!" He spoke
defiantly. "You may depend I never let on in the Five Towns about my
beautiful marriage.... That's the tale. You've got to remember I was
twenty-two!"

She thought of Edwin Clayhanger and Charlie Orgreave as being about
twenty-two, and tried in her imagination to endow the mature George
Cannon with their youth and their simplicity and their freshness. She
was saddened and overawed; not wrathful, not obsessed by a sense of
injury.

Then she heard a sob in the corner, and then another. The moment was
terrible for her. She could only distinguish in the room the blur of a
man's shape against the light-coloured wall-paper, and the whiteness of
the counterpane, and the dark square of the window broken by the black
silhouette of the mirror. She slipped off the bed, and going i