nsult? Did she not
even wait to bury her dead? Pah! she was not value for his thought. A
girl so lightly facile might be blown from here to there and she would
scarcely notice the difference. Here and there were the same places to
her, and him and him were the same person. A girl of that type comes
to a bad end: he had seen it often, the type and the end, and never
separate. Can one not prophesy from facts? He saw a slut in a slum, a
drab hovering by a dark entry, and the vision cheered him mightily for
one glowing minute and left him unoccupied for the next, into which
she thronged with the flutter of wings and the sound of a great
mocking.

His aunt tracked his brows back to the responsible duties of his
employment and commiserated with him, and made a lamentation about
matters with which he never had been occupied, so that the last tag
of his good manners departed from him, and he damned her unswervingly
into consternation. That other pleasant girl, whose sweetness he had
not so much tasted as sampled, had taken to brooding in his presence:
she sometimes drooped an eye upon him like a question.... Let her look
out or maybe he'd blaze into her teeth: howl menace down her throat
until she swooned. Some one should yield to him a visible and tangible
agony to balance his. Does law probe no deeper than the pillage of a
watch? Can one filch our self-respect and escape free? Shall not our
souls also sue for damages against its aggressor? Some person rich
enough must pay for his lacerations or there was less justice in
heaven than in the Police Courts; and it might be that girl's lot to
expiate the sins of Mary. It would be a pleasure, if a sour one, to
make somebody wriggle as he had, and somebody should wriggle; of that
he was blackly determined.

XXIX

Indeed, Mrs. Cafferty's lodger and Mary had become quite intimate, and
it was not through the machinations of either that this had happened.
Ever since Mrs. Makebelieve had heard of that young man's appetite and
the miseries through which he had to follow it she had been deeply
concerned on his behalf. She declined to believe that the boy ever got
sufficient to eat, and she enlarged to her daughter on the seriousness
of this privation to a young man. Disabilities, such as a young girl
could not comprehend, followed in the train of insufficient
nourishment. Mrs. Cafferty was her friend, and was, moreover, a good
decent woman against whom the tongue of rumor might