it--or croak."

"Oh, but that's nonsense!"

"To you--not to me. You haven't been through the mill that I've been
ground up in. You don't know what it is to have been born--born a
gentleman--and to have blasted yourself into human remains. That's what
I am now--not a man--to say nothing of a gentleman--just human
remains--too awful to look at."

She tried to reason with him. "But, Claude, you mustn't exaggerate
things or put the punishment out of proportion to the crime. Admitting
that what you did to Rosie was dishonorable--brutal, if you like--"

"Oh, it isn't that. It's what I did to myself. Can't you see?"

She saw, but not with the intensity of Claude himself. Sitting down at
last, she let him talk again. He had felt something shattered in him, so
he said, at the very minute when he had turned to leave the
cucumber-house on the day of the final rupture. He knew already that he
was a cad, and that he was doing what only a cad would have done; but he
had expected the remorse to pass. He had known himself for a cad on
other occasions, and yet had outlived the sense of shame. That he should
outlive it again he had taken for granted, though he knew that this time
he couldn't do it without suffering. He was willing to take the
suffering. He was not specially unwilling that Rosie should take it,
too. In her way she had been as much to blame as he was. Though he
didn't question the sincerity of her love for him, she had plotted and
schemed to catch him, because from her point of view he was a rich man's
son, and even so had had moments of disloyalty. He found it not
unreasonable to expect her to share the responsibility for what had
overtaken her. But she, too, would outlive the pain of it and follow his
example in marrying some one else.

Lois felt her opportunity to have fully come. "I think she will. She'll
marry Jim Breen--if you'll only leave her alone."

"Oh, rot!"

The tone expressed the degree of importance he attached to this
possibility. He went on again, discursively, incoherently, covering much
of the same ground, but with new and illuminating details, details of
which the background was still a jumble of suppers and dances and
journeys, but in which the god or the demon gave him no rest. His
distaste for diversion having declared itself from the day of his
starting for Chicago, he had whipped up an appetite to counteract it.
Availing himself of the freedom of a young man plentifully supplied with
mon