He was feeling bitter disappointment, as if he had opened
a door out of a suffocating place and had found it walled up;
but he also felt sure that Rosamond was pleased with the cause of
his disappointment. He preferred not looking at her and not speaking,
until he had got over the first spasm of vexation. After all,
he said in his bitterness, what can a woman care about so much
as house and furniture? a husband without them is an absurdity.
When he looked up and pushed his hair aside, his dark eyes had
a miserable blank non-expectance of sympathy in them, but he
only said, coolly--
"Perhaps some one else may turn up. I told Trumbull to be on
the look-out if he failed with Plymdale."
Rosamond made no remark. She trusted to the chance that nothing
more would pass between her husband and the auctioneer until some
issue should have justified her interference; at any rate, she had
hindered the event which she immediately dreaded. After a pause,
she said--
"How much money is it that those disagreeable people want?"
"What disagreeable people?"
"Those who took the list--and the others. I mean, how much money
would satisfy them so that you need not be troubled any more?"
Lydgate surveyed her for a moment, as if he were looking for symptoms,
and then said, "Oh, if I could have got six hundred from Plymdale
for furniture and as premium, I might have managed.
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