him behind you, now, if you'll only show him that you Heavens!" He looked out at his own future that was yet to be made out of nothing, with his own hands. "If I only had your chance!"
They were silent. Conroy smoked with a vehemence that subsided to a more thoughtful puffing of his pipe as he calmed down to reason. Don gloomed over the squares and circles which he was drawing on his blotter in a bitter idleness of mind. He recalled his father's phrase "the charity of relatives"; Conroy had brought the meaning of it home to him. Heretofore, he had had no thought of the money; he had been working to make himself a place in the world that would be fit to ask her to share with him; and he had accepted these "loans" from his aunt and his uncle as he would have accepted their good wishes. Now he faced the need of paying them back, of freeing himself from Conroy's reproach, of earning, immediately, enough to make himself independent.
Conroy interrupted, in contrition: "Say, Don, don't write to him that I've been I'll start out to-morrow morning, and find something if—if I have to beg for it."
Don did not reply. He had himself arrived at the same resolve.
IV
The first heat of the New York summer had begun to oppress the dry streets with an intolerable glare of
