‘I am in no danger, Charley. Such people don’t take to me,’ I said, self-righteously. ‘But it can’t be too late to break with him. I know my uncle would—I could manage a five-pound note now, I think.’
‘My dear boy, if I had borrowed—. But I have let him pay for me again and again, and I don’t know how to rid the obligation. But it don’t signify. It’s too late anyhow.’
‘What have you done, Charley? Nothing very wrong, I trust.’
The lost look deepened.
‘It’s all over, Wilfrid,’ he said. ‘But it don’t matter. I can take to the river when I please.’
‘But then you know you might happen to go right through the river, Charley.’
‘I know what you mean,’ he said, with a defiant sound like nothing I had ever heard.
‘Charley!’ I cried, ‘I can’t bear to hear you. You can’t have changed so much already as not to trust me. I will do all I can to help you. What have you done?’
‘Oh, nothing!’ he rejoined, and tried to laugh: it was a dreadful failure. ‘But I can’t bear to think of that mother of mine! I wish I could tell you all; but I can’t. How Brotherton would laugh at me now! I can’t be made quite like other people, Wilfrid! You would never have been such a fool.’
‘You are more delicately made than most people, Charley—“touched to finer issues,” as Shakspere says.’