He heard her go upstairs, and with surprising celerity get into bed. Then he sat alone waiting in the dim, jaded dining-room, with the enormous table designed for a hospitality which was never given, and the corner cupboard which had been in all the houses the family had inhabited, and the hanging smoker's cabinet over the mantelpiece which was used as a medicine chest, and the absurd knick-knacks his father had collected, and the plaques his father had painted with apples and cherry-blossom and bulrushes. There was so much in the room that spoke of his father. The whisky and the boxes of cigarettes used to be kept in the corner cupboard. On the table he had helped his father to make the screen out of old Christmas numbers and colored plates of the _Graphic_ and _Illustrated London News_, which had given him employment during the whole of one winter. And he was stirred by the memory of the emotions that must have been behind his mother's strange incoherence, and he told himself that she had suffered, and that his father was to blame for it all and could meet with no fate too harsh. George returned, whistling. "I wanted to talk to you," he said. "Anything you like," replied René. "You won't mind my putting it bluntly?" "No." "Well, you see how it is. I've got a rise, but Elsie hasn't a stiver, and we shall only have enough to pull through on. My money goes out of this house. You've had a soft time up to now; you can't go on. If you want to stay in the house you'll have to buckle to and earn some money, or move to another, or lodgings; but even in the cheapest lodgings it would be a squeeze with mother's little bit." "I see. But I've got another year." "Can't you teach someone something? You've been learning long enough." "I might. I see I must do something. When are you going to be married?" "Next month. What are you staring at?" "Was I staring?" "When you were a kid I used to hit you for staring at me like that, and, by God, I'd like to do it now. Elsie said, she said: 'Your brother's got all his feelings just under his skin.' Why don't you say something?" George rose, went to the corner cupboard and took out a bottle of whisky. The gesture, the lift of the shoulder, the cock of the back of the head, reminded René irresistibly of his father. George turned. "Why can't you stop staring? I'm going to be married. I'm no different. There's nothing very startling in that, is there?" "The whole thing seems to me so----" He stopped, staring more wildly. The word he suppressed was _greedy_, and it was most painfully explanatory. "So what?" "I mean--I liked her. She seems a good sort." "No nonsense about Elsie." "Doesn't it make you understand mother more?" "Mother? She's a queer little devil. Didn't speak to me for a fortnight after I told her, and she took to going to church again. She's a rum 'un, is mother. I believe she'd do anything if it wasn't she's so darned fond of you." "Oh, you think it's me?"