But not even by all these hindrances and obstacles to his love for
Zena Pepperleigh would Peter Pupkin have been driven to commit
suicide (oh, yes; he committed it three times, as I'm going to tell
you), had it not been for another thing that he knew stood once and
for all and in cold reality between him and Zena.

He felt it in a sort of way, as soon as he knew her. Each time that
he tried to talk to her about his home and his father and mother and
found that something held him back, he realized more and more the
kind of thing that stood between them. Most of all did he realize it,
with a sudden sickness of heart, when he got word that his father and
mother wanted to come to Mariposa to see him and he had all he could
do to head them off from it.

Why? Why stop them? The reason was, simple enough, that Pupkin was
ashamed of them, bitterly ashamed. The picture of his mother and
father turning up in Mariposa and being seen by his friends there and
going up to the Pepperleigh's house made him feel faint with shame.

No, I don't say it wasn't wrong. It only shows what difference of
fortune, the difference of being rich and being poor, means in this
world. You perhaps have been so lucky that you cannot appreciate what
it means to feel shame at the station of your own father and mother.
You think it doesn't matter, that honesty and kindliness of heart are
all that counts. That only shows that you have never known some of
the bitterest feelings of people less fortunate than yourself.

So it was with Mr. Pupkin. When he thought of his father and mother
turning up in Mariposa, his face reddened with unworthy shame.