m, and life no decorous scheme, but a personal combat or a
personal truce. For the same reason ancestry also was trivial, and a man
not the dearer because the same woman was mother to them both. Yet it
seemed worth while to go to Sawston with the news. Perhaps nothing would
come of it; perhaps friendly intercourse, and a home while he looked
around.

When they wronged him he walked quietly away. He never thought of
allotting the blame, nor or appealing to Ansell, who still sat brooding
in the side-garden. He only knew that educated people could be horrible,
and that a clean liver must never enter Dunwood House again. The air
seemed stuffy. He spat in the gutter. Was it yesterday he had lain in
the rifle-butts over Salisbury? Slightly aggrieved, he wondered why he
was not back there now. "I ought to have written first," he reflected.
"Here is my money gone. I cannot move. The Elliots have, as it were,
practically robbed me." That was the only grudge he retained against
them. Their suspicions and insults were to him as the curses of a tramp
whom he passed by the wayside. They were dirty people, not his sort. He
summed up the complicated tragedy as a "take in."

While Rickie was being carried upstairs, and while Ansell (had he known
it) was dashing about the streets for him, he lay under a railway arch
trying to settle his plans. He must pay back the friends who had given
him shillings and clothes. He thought of Flea, whose Sundays he was
spoiling--poor Flea, who ought to be in them now, shining before his
girl. "I daresay he'll be ashamed and not go to see her, and then she'll
take the other man." He was also very hungry. That worm Mrs. Elliot
would be through her lunch by now. Trying his braces round him, and
tearing up those old wet documents, he stepped forth to make money. A
villainous young brute he looked: his clothes were dirty, and he had
lost the spring of the morning. Touching the walls, frowning, talking to
himself at times, he slouched disconsolately northwards; no wonder that
some tawdry girls screamed at him, or that matrons averted their eyes
as they hurried to afternoon church. He wandered from one suburb to
another, till he was among people more villainous than himself, who
bought his tobacco from him and sold him food. Again the neighbourhood
"went up," and families, instead of sitting on their doorsteps, would
sit behind thick muslin curtains. Again it would "go down" into a more
avowed despair. Far in