thing"--he indicated the lighted front of Mrs. Meecher's home-from-home
with a wide gesture--"is that it's over. Finished and done with. These
people were all very well when..."

"... when you'd lost your week's salary at poker and wanted to borrow a
few dollars for the rent."

"I always paid them back," protested Fillmore, defensively.

"I did."

"Well, we did," said Fillmore, accepting the amendment with the air of a
man who has no time for chopping straws. "Anyway, what I mean is, I
don't see why, just because one has known people at a certain period in
one's life when one was practically down and out, one should have them
round one's neck for ever. One can't prevent people forming an
I-knew-him-when club, but, darn it, one needn't attend the meetings."

"One's friends..."

"Oh, friends," said Fillmore. "That's just where all this makes me so
tired. One's in a position where all these people are entitled to call
themselves one's friends, simply because father put it in his will that
I wasn't to get the money till I was twenty-five, instead of letting me
have it at twenty-one like anybody else. I wonder where I should have
been by now if I could have got that money when I was twenty-one."

"In the poor-house, probably," said Sally.

Fillmore was wounded.