paid,
and the seventy-seven thousand dollars, in bills of large denomination,
were warming his heart from the inner pocket of his waistcoat. So he
came up to me, scowling, but friendly.

"Why didn't you tell me you wanted to be let off, Harvey?" he said
reproachfully. "I'd 'a' done it. Now, damn you, you've put me in a place
where I've got to give you the whip."

To flush at this expression from Dominick was a hypocritical refinement
of sensitiveness. To draw myself up haughtily, to turn on my heel and
walk away,--that was the silliness of a boy. Still, I am glad I did both
those absurd things. When I told my mother how I had ruined myself in
politics she began to cry,--and tears were not her habit. Then she got
my father's picture and kissed it and talked to it about me, just as if
he were there with us; and for a time I felt that I was of heroic
stature.

But, as the days passed, with no laurels in the form of cases and fees,
and as clients left me through fear of Dominick's power, I shriveled
back to human size, and descended from my pedestal. From the
ground-level I began again to look about the matter-of-fact world.

I saw I was making only a first small payment on the heavy price for the
right to say, no, for the right to be free to break with any man or any
enterprise that menaced my self-ownership. That right I felt I must
keep, whatever its cost. Some men can, or think they can, lend their
self-ownership and take it back at convenience; I knew I was not of
them--and let none of them judge me. Especially let none judge me who
only deludes himself that he owns himself, who has sold himself all his
life long for salaries and positions or for wealth, or for the empty
reputation of power he wields only on another's sufferance.

A glance about me was enough to disclose the chief reason why so many
men had surrendered the inner citadel of self-respect. In the crucial
hour, when they had had to choose between subservience and a hard battle
with adversity, forth from their hearts had issued a traitor weakness,
the feeling of responsibility to wife and children, and this traitor
had easily delivered them captive to some master or masters. More, or
less, than human, it seemed to me, was the courage that could make
successful resistance to this traitor, and could strike down and drag
down wife and children. "I must give up Elizabeth," I said to myself,
"for her own sake as well as for mine. Marry her I must not until