With paper and pencil, with the bills and his
own calculations, he made her understand. His hands shook, but he
went through with it item by item, through everything they had spent
from the moment they left Kunitz. They were in such a corner, so
tightly jammed, that all efforts to hide it and pretend there was no
corner seemed to him folly. He now saw that such efforts always had
been folly, and that he ought to have seen to it that her mind on this
important point was from the first perfectly clear; then nothing would
have happened. "You have had the misfortune, ma'am, to choose a fool
for your protector in this adventure," he said bitterly, pushing the
papers from him as though he loathed the sight of them.
Priscilla sat dumfoundered. She was looking quite straight for the
first time at certain pitiless aspects of life. For the first time she
was face to face with the sternness, the hardness, the relentlessness
of everything that has to do with money so soon as one has not got
any. It seemed almost incredible to her that she who had given so
lavishly to anybody and everybody, who had been so glad to give, who
had thought of money when she thought of it at all as a thing to be
passed on, as a thing that soiled one unless it was passed on, but
that, passed on, became strangely glorified and powerful for good--it
seemed incredible that she should be in need of it herself, and unable
to think of a single person who would give her some.
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