"They would if it appeared over my name."
"But I couldn't ask you to do that—and for a mere matter of money," he cried.
"I would gladly, for you."
"But it would scarcely be fair, either to you or to me."
She almost hated him, she felt, when he stood so proudly behind that old-time integrity of character of his. Even as she argued, though, she secretly hoped against hope that he would hold out, that he would defeat her where she stood. Then remembering again more than one scene of inward humiliation over what he seemed to have accepted as her womanly proneness to tangle the devious skeins of ethics and expediency, a touch of the tyrant came to her once more.
"I want you to have this money," she pleaded. "It's only right that you should. You need it—I have made you need it."
He turned to her suddenly as he paced up and down the room.
"Isn't there any possible way of obviating the—the deception?" he asked.
The mere utterance of that question told her that the problem had been solved. Perhaps the quiet and businesslike manner in which it had been presented to him had robbed it of its more abstract significance, had enabled it to be smuggled into him in the sheep's clothing of a commercial commonplace. Perhaps he was more embarrassed—in a financial way—than she had dreamed, and now that he had sunned himself on the warm sands of respectability, dreaded another plunge into the chilly depths of a second poverty.
"I don't see any way out of it," she answered. "I suppose, unless you have an inkling of newspaper ways, such things have a tendency to shock you?"