"Nonsense!" he said. He had a way of dismissing things with "Nonsense!"
He got up and walked up and down the little aisle a moment, pulling at his lower lip in a way he had, and watching me all the time. I was huddled up on the seat, not exactly crying, but almost. Presently he said:
"Just as if it mattered whether you ever saw me again or not. After you've been in Chicago a while, you'll only think of me, perhaps, as a convenient old chap—a sort of bank to whom you can always apply for—" he paused before saying the word, and then brought it out hard—"money."
"Please don't think that of me!" I cried.
"I don't think it of you in particular, but of every one," he said. "Women are all alike. For that matter, men, too. Money is their god—money, dirty money! That's what men, and women, exist for. They marry for money. They live for it. Good God! they die for it! You can have a man's wife or anything else, but touch his money, his dirty money—" He threw out his hands expressively. He had been talking disjointedly, and as if the subject was one that fascinated him, and yet that he hated. "You see," he said, "I know what I am talking about, because that's about all any one has ever wanted of me—my money."
I made a little sound of protest. I was not crying, badly as I felt, but my face was burning, and I felt inexpressibly about that money of his that I, too, had taken. He went on in the jerking, bitter way he had been speaking:
"Just now you think that such things do not count. That's because you are so young. You'll change quickly enough; I predict that. I can read your fate in your young face. You love pretty things, and were made to have them. Why not? Some one is going to give them to you, just as Dr. Manning—and, for that matter, I myself—would have given them to you here in Richmond. I don't doubt in Chicago there will be many men who will jump at the chance."
He made a queer, shrugging gesture with his shoulders, and then swung around, looked at me hard, and as if almost he measured me. Then his face slightly softened, and he said:
"Don't look so cut up. I'm only judging you by the rest of your sex."
I said: