She saw beneath his attempt to make light of the situation a deep and cruel humiliation. He was looking forward to the keenest torture to which a man trained in vanity to false ideals can be subjected; and the thing itself, so Adelaide was thinking, would be more cruel than his writhing anticipation of it.
"Still," she insisted to him, "you are brave. You might have borrowed of mother and gone off to make one failure after another in gentlemanly attempts. You might have"—she was going to say, "tried to make a rich marriage," but stopped herself in time. "Oh, I forgot," she said, instead, "there's the five thousand dollars. Why not spend it in studying law—or something?"
"I've lost my five thousand," he replied. "I paid it for a lesson that was cheap at the price." Then, thoughtfully, "I've dropped out of the class 'gentleman' for good and all."
"Or into it," suggested she.
He disregarded this; he knew it was an insincerity—one of the many he and Del were now trying to make themselves believe against the almost hopeless handicap of the unbelief they had acquired as part of their "Eastern culture." He went on: "There's one redeeming feature of the—the situation."
"Only one?"
"And that for you," he said. "At least, you've got a small income."
"But I haven't," she replied. "Dory made me turn it over to mother."
Arthur stared. "Dory!"
"Yes," she answered, with a nod and a smile. It would have given Dory a surprise, a vastly different notion as to what she thought of him, had he seen her unawares just then.