"I am waiting," I announced, with dangerous patience.
"Well—I admit the situation seemed difficult, but it was in the future," he answered finally, "and I thought, perhaps—"
"Never mind. You would have gone out of my life with the amusing knowledge that you had a hold on me, to a certain extent? It was well planned," I said, growing colder and colder minute by minute, until in the sunny warmth of the windows I shivered uncontrollably. "But you must have thought me even more of an imbecile than I am. I owe you," I ended, "a large sum of money. When we are separated, when Father gets used to that fact, and when he realizes how well I am, how strong, there will be some sort of work for me somewhere, I am sure, that will both occupy my time, and enable me to repay you."
"Work?" said Bill, and then, under his breath, "My God!"
He was angry, I knew—hurt, I felt. And I was glad.
"I am not a—charity patient, Dr. Denton!" I said, and left the room.
The rest of that day is a blank to me now. If I had suffered before, I suffered a thousand-fold now. I could not look at the miniature. I was even angry with Father—dearest Father, who had done his "human best" for me. I hated myself, I hated life, I wanted to die. To be laughed at; to have had my little defiances and independences met with the secret thought "the very clothes on her back were bought with my money"; to have been fooled and fooled again, to his heart's content; to have lived on the bounty of a man who despised me, hurt and wounded me at every turn—it was unbearable.
When I was home again, when the tangle finally became unraveled, I would go to Uncle John. I would ask him frankly what to do; tell him the whole, bitter little story; ask him to find work for me—reading proof, correcting manuscript, scrubbing floors—I didn't care. There were business schools, I thought vaguely—and cursed the years of invalidism which had kept from me so much knowledge of the world, so unfitted me to cope with it, once I was on my material feet.
Father need never know. He would think it a whim, would be, I imagined, even a little proud, would believe, even, that I sought to distract myself after the wreck of my married life. Other women had done the same thing.
I thought of the city as I had seen it: the crowds and the loneliness and the bleakness of the streets: the hurrying, uncaring people—I had read of girls in the city; the indignities of the boarding house; the strain and the demand and the difficult way that lies before the untrained wage-earner—