He bowed, and Mrs. Mandel said, “Of course, it’s only your action that I am concerned with.”

She seemed to him merely triumphant, and he could not conceive what it had cost her to nerve herself up to her too easy victory.  He left Mrs. Mandel to a far harder lot than had fallen to him, and he went away hating her as an enemy who had humiliated him at a moment when he particularly needed exalting.  It was really very simple for him to stop going to see Christine Dryfoos, but it was not at all simple for Mrs. Mandel to deal with the consequences of his not coming.  He only thought how lightly she had stopped him, and the poor woman whom he had left trembling for what she had been obliged to do embodied for him the conscience that accused him of unpleasant things.

“By heavens! this is piling it up,” he said to himself through his set teeth, realizing how it had happened right on top of that stupid insult from Mrs. Horn.  Now he should have to give up his place on ’Every Other Week; he could not keep that, under the circumstances, even if some pretence were not made to get rid of him; he must hurry and anticipate any such pretence; he must see Fulkerson at once; he wondered where he should find him at that hour.  He thought, with bitterness so real that it gave him a kind of tragical satisfaction, how certainly he could find him a little later at Mrs. Leighton’s; and Fulkerson’s happiness became an added injury.

The thing had, of course, come about just at the wrong time.  There never had been a time when Beaton needed money more, when he had spent what he had and what he expected to have so recklessly.  He was in debt to Fulkerson personally and officially for advance payments of salary.  The thought of sending money home made him break into a scoffing laugh, which he turned into a cough in order to deceive the passers.  What sort of face should he go with to Fulkerson and tell him that he renounced his employment on ‘Every Other Week;’ and what should he do when he had renounced it?  Take pupils, perhaps; open a class?  A lurid conception of a class conducted on those principles of shameless flattery at which Mrs. Horn had hinted—­he believed now she had meant to insult him—­presented itself.  Why should not he act upon the suggestion?  He thought with loathing for the whole race of women—­dabblers in art.  How easy the thing would be:  as easy as to turn back now and tell that old fool’s girl that he loved her, and rake in half his millions.  Why should not he do that?  No one else cared for him; and at a year’s end, probably, one woman would be like another as far as the love was concerned, and probably he should not be more tired if the woman were Christine Dryfoos than if she were Margaret Vance.  He kept Alma Leighton out of the question, because at the bottom of his heart he believed that she must be forever unlike every other woman to him.