The New Life

by Tom Crewe

“They would not think of her at all,” she snapped. “She does not come into it. I know how you felt as a child. Your longings. Your photograph that you fidgeted over, until your father bid you stop. I am sorry for you. Do you know what I wanted as a girl? A husband who loved me. A man in a blue necktie, with polished shoes. You say you were lonely”—her voice broke again; the tears in her eyes brokenly reflected the window—“I was lonely,” she went on, “and I was not free to go into the streets, to go with soldiers to their dirty lodgings. I was not free to bring strange men to this house. I was not free to install in it a man of another class, twenty years younger. Not free to share a bed with him—not free to send him out with my silly daughter for the afternoon. But it is you who have been lonely. It says so in your book.”