"Oh—but I shall not apply for it. I don't want it, you see."
"It is not a question of whether you want it or not. It is yours—in just the way that the furniture in this room is yours. You simply have no right to evade it."
Through all the agitation she felt in the sudden dragging out of this long-buried subject, his air of dictatorial authority brought the blood to her cheek.
"I have a right to evade it, in the first place, and in the second, I am not evading it at all. He took it; I let him keep it. That is the whole situation. I don't want it—I couldn't touch it—"
"Well, don't decide that now. There would be no harm, I suppose, in your talking with your mother about it—even with some man in whose judgment you have confidence. You will feel differently when you have had time to think it over. Probably it—"
"Thinking it over will make not the slightest difference in the way I feel—"
"Perhaps it would if you stopped thinking about it from a purely selfish point of view. Other—"
"What?"
"I say," he repeated dryly, "that you should stop thinking of the matter from a purely selfish point of view. Don't you know that that is what you are doing? You are thinking only whether or not you, personally, desire this money. Well, other people have an interest in the question besides you. There is your mother, for example. Why not consider it from her standpoint? Why not consider it from—well, from the standpoint of Mr. Surface?"
"Of Mr. Surface?"