"You bet I'm through with him. You tell him so--tell him I don't want to
see him again--I won't be bothered----" She broke off, and added, with
a kind of rough relenting: "Put it any blessed way you like--say what's
true--we've had our good times together--and it seems they're over--we've
no use for one another."
"You mean--now he's failed."
"What do _you_ mean--'now he's failed'? What's his rotten old exam got
to do with me? I don't even know what it's about."
"You took the good time whilst you could get it, and now when you can't
hope for anything more----"
She stopped short, and they faced each other with an antagonism that
neither gave nor asked for quarter. They had always been enemies, and
now that the gloves were off they were almost glad.
"So that's my line. Cradle-snatching. Vamping the helpless infant!" She
burst into a fit of angry, ugly laughter. "A good time! Running round
with a poor kid with ten shillings a week pocket-money--eating in beastly
cheap restaurants--riding on the tops of 'buses when some girls I know
are feeding at the Ritz and rolling round in limousines. That's what I
get for being soft. And now because I won't shoot myself, or go off to
nowhere steerage, I'm a bad, abandoned woman. What d'you take me for?"
"What you are," he said.
She went dead white under her streaky paint.
"You--you've got no right to say that. You're a devil--a stuck-up
devil--I hate you--I'd have always hated you if I'd bothered to mind.
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