ld save him, and she alone. She could save him, if
she could first of all save herself.

With his head pressed against her she made the vow as she had made it
fifty times already. She would be gentle with him; she would be
patient; she would let him work off on her the agony of his suffering
nerves, and smile at him through it all. She would help him out of the
idiotic situation in which he found himself. The other girl was only
an incident, as the show-girl had been to the Bellington boy, and
could be disposed of. She attached to that only a secondary importance
in comparison with the whole thing--her saving him. She would save
him, even if it meant rooting out every instinct in her soul.

But as he made his way blindly back to the club, his own conclusions
were different. He must go to the devil. He must go to the devil now,
whatever else he did. Going to the devil would set her free from him.
It was the only thing that would. It would set him free from the other
woman, set him free from life itself. Life tortured him. He was a
misfit in it. He should never have been born. He had always understood
that his parents hadn't wanted children and that his coming had been
resented. You couldn't be born like that and find it natural to be in
the world. He had never found it natural. He couldn't remember the
time when he hadn't been out of his element in life, and now he must
recognize the fact courageously.

It would be easy enough. He had worked up an artificial appetite for
all that went under the head of debauchery. It had meant difficult
schooling at first, because his natural tastes were averse to that
kind of thing, but he had been schooled. Schooled was the word, since
his training had begun under the very roof where his father had sent
him to get religion and discipline. There had been no let-up in this
educational course, except when he himself had stolen away, generally
in solitude, for a little holiday.

But as he put it to himself, he knew all the roads and by-paths and
cross-country leaps that would take him to the gutter, and to the
gutter he would go.

Chapter VII

And all this while Letty was in the dining-room, learning certain
lessons from her new-found friend.

For some little time she had been alone. Steptoe finished his
conversation with Miss Walbrook on the telephone, but did not come
back. She sat at the table feeding Beppo with bread and milk, but
wondering if, after all, she hadn't be