Marjorie Bowen

“ It was, after all, very easy to slip back into the old groove, to have what she wanted without pausing to count the cost, to move among quiet, pleasant people who were not anxious about pence. To be free of the noise and smells of the cheap flats and the bleak desolation of the starved common was in itself a delight, and it was from a firm entrenchment of rebellion that Fleur Ange received a grim and cold Quentin that afternoon when he arrived in the gay little hotel drawing-room. ”

“ Fleur Ange had to encourage herself by looking at herself in the oval gilt mirror over the frivolous console, in assuring herself of her admired prettiness and the charm that had once before made Quentin forego his principles—his stern resolve not to marry till he was a successful man, and not to marry a woman with money. ”

“ The suet pudding represented the facts of life, the solid stratum to which whipped cream is only the merest decoration. Fleur Ange had married a poor man and was living as a poor man's wife; it was an experiment of which she had often read, and always as gilded by a beautiful sentiment that concealed all sordidness. ”

“ She had even, in her love for Quentin Fairfax, done a very fantastic thing, something that people had rather laughed at. She possessed in her own right a little fortune that had come from her mother; it amounted to an income of nearly two thousand a year, and Fleur Ange, at her lover's stern insistence, had left this money untouched; he had refused to marry her on any other terms.
"I can't make good struggling against your income," he had said. "I've got to feel the burden is on me. We shan't be paupers. I make five hundred a year; it will be a good life. ”

“ We all want a change; we never go away except for that one fortnight. I don't like John's cough. I should like to take him to Town to see a really first-class man."
"I'll see what Pollock has to say," frowned Quentin.
Fleur Ange smiled sweetly. "Oh, you won't take my word for it, I suppose?"
"Well, I've noticed nothing wrong with the little chap myself, and I don't want to waste money."
She caught at the last word, the word that had been uppermost in her mind for so long now. "It is a pity that it should have to be a question of money, Quentin." ”

“ And, deepest grievance of all, Quentin did not seem to appreciate her sacrifice. He was himself from a home of stern though decent poverty, the arid grind of a clergyman's family's existence in a small town, and he honestly thought he was earning a lot of money, and that they were living quite comfortably. Fleur Ange had a woman for the hardest work, and it seemed to her husband only natural that she should occupy herself with the other duties. ”

“ The breach between Quentin and herself she carefully covered up; it was astonishing how easily people accepted her excuse of "change for the children," and "Quentin working so hard; he is almost always at the works."
And still he did not write.
And still Fleur Ange could not bring herself to write again. But one day, unable to resist an overwhelming impulse of yearning, she took the once-so-familiar omnibus and went out to the distant suburb and the barren common, now grey under a winter sky. ”

“ Fleur Ange did not write—she felt that matters had gone beyond the written word—but with bitter haste she made her plans. Every scrap of anything that she had bought with her own money she packed up and sent to a hospital; the efficient nurse was returned to the exclusive registry office, and Fleur Ange, in the dingy clothes in which she had made her escape, with the children in their original shabby coats, went again to the lawyers' offices in Lincoln's Inn Fields. ”

“ The longest-living author of this work died in 1952, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 71 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works. ”