rning?"

"Yes."

"Oh, I didn't want to worry you. What good would it have done?"

"What good would it have done!" George repeated in accents of terrible
disdain, as though the good that it would have done was obvious to the
lowest intelligence. (Yet he knew quite well that it would have done no
good at all.) "Georgie, take that spoon out of your sleeve."

And Georgie, usually disobedient, took the porridge-laden spoon out of
his sleeve and glanced at his mother for moral protection. His mother
merely wiped him rather roughly. Georgie thought, once more, that he
never in this world should understand grown-up people. And the recurring
thought made him cry gently.

George lapsed into savage meditation. During all the seven years of his
married life he had somehow supposed himself to be superior, as a man,
to his struggling rivals. He had regarded them with easy toleration, as
from a height. And now he saw himself tumbling down among them,
humiliated. Everything seemed unreal to him then. The studio and the
breakfast-room were solid; the waving trees in Regent's Park were
solid; the rich knick-knacks and beautiful furniture and excellent food
and fine clothes were all solid enough; but they seemed most
disconcertingly unreal. One letter from old Samuel had made them
tremble, and the second had reduced them to illusions, or delusions.
Even George's reputation as a rising sculptor appeared utterly
fallacious. What rendered him savage was the awful injustice of Samuel.
Samuel had no right whatever to play him such a trick. It was, in a way,
worse than if Samuel had cut off the allowance altogether, for in that
case he could at any rate have gone majestically to Samuel and said:
"Your niece and her child are starving." But with a minimum of three
hundred a year for their support three people cannot possibly starve.

"Ring the bell and have this kid taken out," said he.

Whereupon Georgie yelled.

Kate came, a starched white-and-blue young thing of sixteen.

"Kate," said George, autocratically, "take baby."

"Yes, sir," said Kate, with respectful obedience. The girl had no notion
that she was not real to her master, or that her master was saying to
himself: "I ought not to be ordering human beings about like this. I
can't pay their wages. I ought to be starving in a garret."

When George and Mary were alone, George said: "Look here! Does he mean
it?"

"You may depend he means it. It's so like him. Me asking for tha