"I thought you said you couldn't afford her?"

"I can't. Not yet. But I _will_ afford her. I will. I give myself
another--" He stopped. His mouth fell ajar, and I saw his lips moving as
he went through some inaudible calculation--"another six months."

He hid his face in his hands and ran his fingers through his hair.
Then, as if he conceived himself to be unobserved behind this shelter,
he let himself go; and I became the witness of an agony, a passion, a
self-abandoned nakedness, to the utter shedding of all reticences and
decencies, with nothing but those thin hands and that hair between
me and it.

"I'll work," he said. "I'll work like a hundred bloody niggers. Like ten
hundred thousand million sweated tailors in a stinking cellar. I'll
pinch. I'll skimp and save. I'll deny myself butter. I'll wear celluloid
collars and sell my dress-suit. My God! I'd sell the coat off my back and
the shoes off my feet; I'd sell my own mother's body off her death-bed,
and go without my dinner for nine months to see her again for five
minutes. Just to see her for five minutes. Five (unprintable) little
minutes that another man wouldn't know what to do with, wouldn't use for
tying up a bootlace in."

Pause.

"I didn't know it hurt. I didn't know a girl's face could land you one
like this, and her eyes jab you, and her voice turn round and round in
your stomach like a circular saw. That's what it feels like. Exactly.