Never to Love Read Online Free PDF Page B

sarcasm seemed more in character, or the cold, silent displeasu r e that was often more terrifying than an outburst of wrath.
    “Suppose ... suppose there was something disreputable about me?” she said slowly.
    “Is there?” He looked amused.
    “I don’t belong to your world, Justin. Everything I have I had to fight for. Even Jill doesn’t know the truth about me.”
    “What is the truth?” he said quietly.
    She made a restless movement, wondering how she could begin to make him understand.
    “I told you that I was brought up in Liverpool and started work at fifteen, ” she began slowly. “I suppose you thought my parents were hard up, but it was more than that. My father died when I was seven. He was a hopeless drunkard. My mother’s people didn’t approve of her marriage and wouldn’t help her, so she had to work in a factory, leaving me in the care of the neighbors. We lived in a basement in a street called Briggs Lane. It was a slum. There was a gas meter just behind us and everything smelled of gas, even the food. The women went about in carpet slippers with metal bobby pins in their hair and most of the children had skin diseases and nits. Do you know anyone who has nits, Justin? Well, that’s the sort of background I come from. My mother died just after I started work and I lived in a working girls’ hostel. It seemed like paradise after the basement.”
    All the time she was talking she had not looked at him, guessing the distaste that must show on his face. To someone like Justin, who had never known what it was to be poor, the recital must have sounded doubly squalid.
    “Is that all?”
    “Yes, that’s all,” she said tersely. “The rest you know.”
    She heard him move and a moment later he was beside her, turning her around to face him.
    I “I asked you to marry me,” he said gravely. “Where you were born or how you lived as a child has nothing to do with it.”
    “You don’t have to be chivalrous,” she said bitterly .
    “When you know me better you will find that chivalry is not one of my virtues.”
    “Supposing I accepted. What would your family and your friends think?”
    “What other people think has never particularly concerned me.”
    “It’s easy to say that now, but you might regret it later.”
    “My dear child, the principal advantage of having a considerable amount of money is that it enables one to do exactly as one pleases, regardless of other people’s reactions. Besides, there is nothing particularly disgraceful about what you just told me. Poverty is a common misfortune.” He glanced at his watch. “It’s getting late. I think we’ll postpone our tour of the house till another night. I’ll take you home.”
    He went across to the fireside and pulled the bell. While they waited for Hubbard to answer it, he said, “I’ll give you three days to think this over, Andrea. If you make up your mind before then, you can telephone me. If not we’ll have dinner on Friday.”
    They did not talk on the way to the apartment, but outside her door he took her hands in his and said, “Take your time over it, my dear, and remember that you have just as much to offer me as I have you. As it happens, I decided t o ask you to marry me some time ago, but I waited till tonight for you to get to know me better. We have a lot in common, and I think we could deal well together.”
    When he had gone she climbed the stairs to the apartment feeling curiously exhausted, as if she had been through some physical ordeal. Jill was still out with Nick, and she made herself a cup of tea and sat at the kitchen, table thinking over all that Justin had said.
    Once, when she was about ten years old, she had woken up in the night and heard her mother crying. Andrea had never forgotten the sound of those dreadful racking sobs, and it was then, at an age when most children are scarcely aware of sorrow and hardship, that she made up her mind that one day she would escape from Briggs Lane and