Paul laughed again, a scornful, hateful laugh, which brought the color up to Lydia's pale face like a blow. "I gather, then, Lydia, that what you're asking me to do is to neglect my business in order to read socialist literature with you?"
His wife's rare resentment rose. She spoke with dignity: "I begged you to be serious, Paul, and to try to understand what I mean, although I'm so fumbling, and say it so badly. As for its being impossible to change things, I've heard you say a great many times that there are no conditions that can't be changed if people would really try--"
"Good heavens! I said that of _business_ conditions!" shouted Paul, outraged at being so misquoted.
"Well, if it's true of them--No; I feel that things are the way they are because we don't really care enough to have them some other way. If you really cared as much about sharing a part of your life with me--really sharing--as you do about getting the Washburn contract--"
Her indignant and angry tone, so entirely unusual, moved Paul, more than her words, to shocked protest. He looked deeply wounded, and his accent was that of a man righteously aggrieved. "Lydia, I lay most of this absurd outbreak to your nervous condition, and so I can't blame you for it. But I can't help pointing out to you that it is entirely uncalled for. There are few women who have a husband as absolutely devoted as yours. You grumble about my not sharing my life with you--why, I _give_ it to you entire!" His astonished bitterness grew as he voiced it. "What am I working so hard for if not to provide for you and our child--our children! Good Heavens! What more _can_ I do for you than to keep my nose on the grindstone every minute. There are limits to even a husband's time and endurance and capacity for work."
Lydia heard a frightened roaring in her ears at this unexpected turn to the conversation. Paul had never spoken so to her before. This was a very different tone from his irritation over defective housekeeping. She was as horrified as he over the picture that he held up with such apparently justified indignation, the picture of her as a querulous and ungrateful wife. Why, Paul was looking at her as though he hated her! For the first time in her married life, she conceived the possibility that she and Paul might quarrel, really seriously quarrel, about fundamental things. The idea terrified her beyond words. Her mind, undisciplined and never very clear, became quite confused, and only her long preparation and expectation of this talk enabled her to keep on at all, although now she could but falter ahead blindly. "Why, Paul dear--don't look at me so! I never dreamed of _blaming_ you for it! It's just because I want things better for you that I'm so anxious to--"