Scotland -- Social life and customs -- 19th century -- Fiction
She brought her hands together with a happy movement that at the last
instant she checked. But indeed she was very glad. For nowadays if
anybody was unkind, and on Saturday nights people were tired and busy
and altogether disposed to be unkind, she immediately noted it as fresh
evidence that there did indeed exist that human conspiracy of
malevolence in which the sudden unprovoked unceasing cruelty of Mr.
Philip had made her believe. But if the client from Rio were with her,
things would not happen perversely and she would not think dark
thoughts. "That'll be fine. You'll make a grand jumentum."
"Ju--?"
"Jumentum, jumenti, neuter, second. A beast of burden. It's a word that
Caesar was much addicted to."
When she came in again from the hall he saw with delight that she had
put on her hat and coat in the dark, and, though she went to the
mantelpiece, it was not to revise the rough draft of her dressing at the
glass, but to fish some money out of a ginger-jar. She brought the
coins over to the table and began to arrange them in little heaps,
evidently making some calculation concerning the domestic finance, while
her face assumed a curious expression of contemptuous thrift. It was as
if she was making her reckoning with scrupulous accuracy and at the same
time ridiculing her own penury and promising herself that there would
come a time when she should make calculations concerning the treasures
of emperors. She was deluding herself with dreams of the time when she
should have crowned herself queen or made herself the hidden
tyrant-saviour of an industry. He detested her ambition: he felt it to
be a kind of spiritual adultery; he moved his clenched hand forward on
the table till it almost touched her money. Immediately she ceased to
add, slowly her gaze travelled from his fingers to his face, and she
smiled a disturbed smile that expressed at first the greeting that one
beautiful animal gives to another, and then poetic wonder at his beauty,
and then happiness because they liked each other so, and at last it
became a sheer grimace of courage because the happiness was turning into
a slight physical misery because there was something she ought to do or
say, and she did not know what it was. And he was smiling too, because
he perfectly knew what she did not.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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