The Price of Love

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The Price of Love

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Title: The Price of Love
Author: Arnold Bennett
Release Date: July 14, 2004 [eBook #12912]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PRICE
OF LOVE***
E-text prepared by Jonathan Ingram, Bill Hershey, and the Project
Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team

THE PRICE OF LOVE

A Tale
by
ARNOLD BENNETT
1914

CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I.
MONEY IN THE HOUSE
II. LOUIS' DISCOVERY
III. THE FEAST
IV. IN THE NIGHT
V. NEWS OF THE NIGHT
VI. THEORIES OF THE THEFT
VII. THE CINEMA
VIII. END AND BEGINNING
IX. THE MARRIED WOMAN
X. THE CHASM
XI. JULIAN'S DOCUMENT
XII. RUNAWAY HORSES

XIII. DEAD-LOCK
XIV. THE MARKET
XV. THE CHANGED MAN
XVI. THE LETTER
XVII. IN THE MONASTERY
XVIII. MRS. TAMS'S STRANGE BEHAVIOUR
XIX. RACHEL AND MR. HORROCLEAVE
CHAPTER I
MONEY IN THE HOUSE
I
In the evening dimness of old Mrs. Maldon's sitting-room stood the
youthful virgin, Rachel Louisa Fleckring. The prominent fact about her
appearance was that she wore an apron. Not one of those white,
waist-tied aprons, with or without bibs, worn proudly,
uncompromisingly, by a previous generation of unaspiring housewives
and housegirls! But an immense blue pinafore-apron, covering the
whole front of the figure except the head, hands, and toes. Its virtues
were that it fully protected the most fragile frock against all the perils
of the kitchen; and that it could be slipped on or off in one second,
without any manipulation of tapes, pins, or buttons and
buttonholes--for it had no fastenings of any sort and merely yawned
behind. In one second the drudge could be transformed into the elegant
infanta of boudoirs, and vice versa. To suit the coquetry of the age the
pinafore was enriched with certain flouncings, which, however, only
intensified its unshapen ugliness.
On a plain, middle-aged woman such a pinafore would have been
intolerable to the sensitive eye. But on Rachel it simply had a piquant

and perverse air, because she was young, with the incomparable, the
unique charm of comely adolescence; it simply excited the imagination
to conceive the exquisite treasures of contour and tint and texture which
it veiled. Do not infer that Rachel was a coquette. Although comely,
she was homely--a "downright" girl, scorning and hating all manner of
pretentiousness. She had a fine best dress, and when she put it on
everybody knew that it was her best; a stranger would have known.
Whereas of a coquette none but her intimate companions can say
whether she is wearing best or second-best on a given high occasion.
Rachel used the pinafore-apron only with her best dress, and her reason
for doing so was the sound, sensible reason that it was the usual and
proper thing to do.
She opened a drawer of the new Sheraton sideboard, and took from it a
metal tube that imitated brass, about a foot long and an inch in diameter,
covered with black lettering. This tube, when she had removed its top,
showed a number of thin wax tapers in various colours. She chose one,
lit it neatly at the red fire, and then, standing on a footstool in the
middle of the room, stretched all her body and limbs upward in order to
reach the gas. If the tap had been half an inch higher or herself half an
inch shorter, she would have had to stand on a chair instead of a
footstool; and the chair would have had to be brought out of the kitchen
and carried back again. But Heaven had watched over this detail. The
gas-fitting consisted of a flexible pipe, resembling a thick black cord,
and swinging at the end of it a specimen of that wonderful and blessed
contrivance, the inverted incandescent mantle within a porcelain globe:
the whole recently adopted by Mrs. Maldon as the dangerous final
word of modern invention. It was safer to ignite the gas from the orifice
at the top of the globe; but even so there was always a mild
disconcerting explosion, followed by a few moments' uncertainty as to
whether or not the gas had "lighted properly."
When the deed was accomplished and the room suddenly bright with
soft illumination, Mrs. Maldon murmured--
"That's better!"
She was sitting in her arm-chair by the glitteringly set table, which,

instead of being in the centre of the floor under the gas, had a place
near the