rsed his weak, scared sobs in his resting arms
for--was the fact that, whatever the trap, it held him as with the grip
of sharp murderous steel. There he was, there he was; alone in the brown
summer dusk--brown through _his_ windows--he cried and he cried. He
shouldn't get out without losing a limb. The only question was which of
his limbs it should be.

Before he went out, later on--for he at last felt the need to--he could,
however, but seek to remove from his face and his betraying eyes, over
his washing-stand, the traces of his want of fortitude. He brushed
himself up; with which, catching his stricken image a bit spectrally
in an old dim toilet-glass, he knew again, in a flash, the glow of
righteous resentment. Who should be assured against coarse usage if
a man of his really elegant, perhaps in fact a trifle over-refined or
"effete" appearance, his absolutely gentlemanlike type, couldn't be?
He never went so far as to rate himself, with exaggeration, a gentleman;
but he would have maintained against all comers, with perfect candour
and as claiming a high advantage, that he was, in spite of that
liability to blubber, "like" one; which he _was_ no doubt, for that
matter, at several points. Like what lady then, who could ever possibly
have been taken for one, was Kate Cookham, and therefore how could one
have anything--anything of the intimate and private order--out with her
fairly and on the plane, the only possible one, of common equality? He
might find himself crippled for life; he believed verily, the more he
thought, that that was what was before him. But be ended by seeing this
doom in the almost redeeming light of the fact that it would all have
been because he was, comparatively, too aristocratic. Yes, a man in his
station couldn't afford to carry that so far--it must sooner or later,
in one way or another, spell ruin. Never mind--it was the only thing
he could be. Of course he should exquisitely suffer--but when hadn't
he exquisitely suffered? How was he going to get through life by _any_
arrangement without that? No wonder such a woman as Kate Cookham had
been keen to annex so rare a value. The right thing would have been that
the highest price should be paid for it--by such a different sort of
logic from this nightmare of _his_ having to pay.

II

Which was the way, of course, he talked to Nan Drury--as he had felt the
immediate wild need to do; for he should perhaps be able to bear it
all somehow