"And the worst of it is, he's too sharp not to find it out--if he
hasn't by this time--and too damn' decent by far to let me know if he
has! ... It can't go on this way with us: I can't let him ... Got to
break with him somehow--now--to-day. I won't let him think me ... what
I've been all along to him.... Bless his foolish heart!..."

This resolution coloured his reverie throughout the uptown journey. And
he strengthened himself with it, deriving a sort of acrid comfort from
the knowledge that henceforth none should know the burden of his
misfortunes save himself. There was no deprecation of Kellogg's
goodness in his mood, simply determination no longer to be a charge
upon it. To contemplate the sum total of the benefits he had received
at Kellogg's hands, since the day when the latter had found him ill and
half-starved, friendless as a stray pup, on the bench in Washington
Square, staggered his imagination. He could never repay it, he told
himself, save inadequately, little by little--mostly by gratitude and
such consideration as he purposed now to exhibit by removing himself
and his distresses from the other's ken. Here was an end to comfort for
him, an end to living in Kellogg's rooms, eating his food, busying his
servants, spending his money--not so much borrowed as pressed upon him.
He stood at the cross-roads, but in no doubt as to which way he should
most honourably take, though it took him straight back to that from
which Kellogg had rescued him.

There crawled in his mind a clammy memory of the sort of housing he had
known in those evil days, and he shuddered inwardly, smelling again the
effluvia of dank oilcloth and musty carpets, of fish-balls and fried
ham, of old-style plumbing and of nine-dollar-a-week humanity in the
unwashen raw--the odour of misery that permeated the lodgings to which
his lack of means had introduced him. He could see again, and with a