letter to Beatrice. I felt a great need to draw near to her. I was
confused and sore and unhappy, and although nothing of this, nor of
the duel appeared in my letter, I was comforted to think that I was
writing it to her. It was good to remember that there was such a woman
in the world, and when I compared her with the girl from whom I had
just parted, I laughed out loud.

And yet I knew that had I put the case to Beatrice, she would have
discovered something to present in favor of Miss Fiske.

"She was pleading for her brother, and she did not understand,"
Beatrice would have said. But in my own heart I could find no excuse.
Her family had brought me nothing but evil. Because her father would
not pay his debts, I had been twice wounded and many times had risked
death; the son had struck me with a whip in the public streets, and
the sister had called me everything that is contemptible, from a cad
to a hired cut-throat. So, I was done with the house of Fiske. My hand
was against it. I owed it nothing.

But with all my indignation against them, for which there was reason
enough, I knew in my heart that I had looked up to them, and stood in
awe of them, for reasons that made me the cad they called me. Ever
since my arrival in Honduras I had been carried away by the talk of
the Fiske millions, and later by the beauty of the girl, and by the
boy's insolent air, of what I accepted as good breeding. I had been
impressed with his five years in Paris, by the cut of his riding-
clothes even, by the fact that he owned a yacht. I had looked up to
them, because they belonged to a class who formed society, as I knew
society through the Sunday papers. And now these superior beings had
rewarded my snobbishness by acting toward me in a way that was