Read "Doomsday" by Warwick Deeping online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
When she had gone, Furze took a tin of tobacco from the black mantelshelf and filled a pipe. His fingers were deliberate and sullen. He kept glancing at the table and about the room with a suggestion of caution, as though he was afraid to look at it, and was not so proud of its ugliness as he wished to be.
Yes, he had to allow that the place was a piggery. And then something savage glowed in him. Damn her, what did she mean by coming to spy and to criticize, and to bring her delicacy and her little nice squeamishness into his house? Cow manure--indeed! Two loads of it! He struck a match, and threw back his head as though to laugh, --but no sound came. Primroses, bluebells, hay, --and now-- cow manure! Women were ingenious cattle! What was she after? Sex, him, a home? But she had a home. Yet what was the ulterior motive? Was she pretending to be sorry? There was no need for her to be sorry for him. If she had any quarrel with his hardness and with the way he lived, let her remember that she had shirked reality three years ago. Cowardice. And she was afraid of him and his house, was she! Then--why the devil--?