It always ended in her having her own way. But sometimes David wondered whether she would have lost interest in him, too, if she had had to wait.
For he saw that another goblin had come unbidden into their home: Discontent. He had learned to seek and always found the wistful look with which she regarded their callers' pretty gowns or heard tales of jolly dinners at the club. (Months ago the club had been dropped.) And he knew that in her heart she was drawing comparisons.
Once she said, "It wasn't like this when Maizie and I were together." She did not guess the barb she left quivering in his heart.
Dick Holden was making no such heavy weather of it. He was even so busy that little odds and ends of his work were turned over to David, crusts for which the latter was as grateful as the Lazaruses always have been. But this suggested another comparison to Shirley.
"Dick Holden gets business and makes money, and everybody says he's not half so clever as you. How does he do it?"
"I don't know how. And if I did know, I couldn't, anyhow. The people that come to me come because they have confidence in my ability. If they don't have confidence, I couldn't work them because--I just couldn't, that's all."
"You're too thin-skinned. If I were a man I'd _make_ them come to me, and then I'd teach them to have confidence--the way Dick Holden does."
"Dick Holden's way, somebody else's, never mine," he thought bitterly, "is always the best."
But he did not let her see him wince. Instead, he said gently, "In the long run it's not the sound way. If I do good work, some day people will realize it and come to me. And I _do_ good work," he cried, not to boast, but because their courage needed a tonic, "and some day when I get my chance I'll do far finer."
She smiled wearily. "Some day! It's always some day. Why don't you _make_ your chance--as Dick does?"
That talk rankled in David's heart long after Shirley had forgotten it. She could say such things and forget them in an hour. But her comparisons never angered him, only hurt. He tried to be just, and blamed himself for their predicament. If he had been wise and firm at the beginning, when the temptations to indulgences came, they could have escaped these troublous waters. Firmness now seemed only cruel.