"Madame Beattie," said he, "if I had money you should have it. Right or wrong you should have it if it would buy you out of here. But I haven't got it."
"It's there you are a fool," she said, moved actually now by his numbness to his own endowment. "I could beat my head and scream, when I think how you're throwing things away, your time, in that beastly night school, your power, your personal charm. Jeff, you've the devil's own luck. You were born with it. And you simply won't use it."
He had said that himself in a moment of hope not long before: that he had the devil's own luck. But he wasn't going to accept it from her.
"You talk of luck," he said, "to a man just out of jail."
"You needn't have been in jail," she was hurling at him in an unpleasant intensity of tone, as if she would have liked to scream it and the quiet street denied her. "If you hadn't pleaded guilty, if you hadn't handed over every scrap of evidence, if you had been willing to take advantage of what that clerk was ready to swear—why, you might have got off and kept on in business and be a millionaire to-day."
How she managed to know some of the things she did he never fathomed. He had never seen anybody of the direct and shameless methods of Madame Beattie, willing to ask the most intimate questions, make the most unscrupulous demands. He remembered the young clerk who had wanted to perjure himself for his sake.
"That would have made a difference, I suppose," he said, "young Williams' testimony. I wonder how he happened to think of it."
"He thought of it because I went to him," said Madame Beattie. "I said, 'Isn't there anything you could swear to that would help him?' He knew at once. He turned white as a sheet. 'Yes,' he said, 'and I'll swear to it.' I told him we'd make it worth his while."
"You did?" said Jeff. "Well, there's another illusion gone. I took a little comfort in young Williams. I thought he was willing to perjure himself because he had an affection for me. So you were to make it worth his while."
She laughed a little, indifferently, with no bitterness, but in retrospect of a scene where she had been worsted.