another, and eaten from the hand of his wife's charity, but"--(all the
pride and pain of the old situation rose up in him, impelled by the
brooding of the years of separation, heightened by the fact that he was
no nearer to his goal of financial independence of her than he was when
he left London five years before)--"but do you think, no matter what I've
done, broken a pledge or not, been in the wrong a thousand times as much
as I was, that I'd be fed by the hand of one to whom I had given a pledge
and broken it? Do you think that I'd give her the chance to say, or not
to say, but only think, 'I forgive you; I will give you your food and
clothes and board and bed, but if you are not good in the future, I will
be very, very angry with you'? Do you think--?"

His face was flaming now. The pent-up flood of remorse and resentment
and pride and love--the love that tore itself in pieces because it had
not the pride and self-respect which independence as to money gives--
broke forth in him, fresh as he was from a brutal interview with the
financial clique whom he had given the chance to make much money, and who
were now, for a few thousand dollars, trying to cudgel him out of his one
opportunity to regain his place in his lost world.

"I live--I live like this," he continued, with a gesture that embraced
the room where they were, "and I have one room to myself where I have
lived over four years"--he pointed towards it. "Do you think I would
choose this and all it means--its poverty and its crudeness, its distance
from all I ever had and all my people had, if I could have stood the
other thing--a pauper taking pennies from his own wife? I had had taste
enough of it while I had a little something left; but when I lost
everything on Flamingo, and I was a beggar, I knew I could not stand the
whole thing. I could not, would not, go under the poor-law and accept
you, with the lash of a broken pledge in your hand, as my guardian. So