"
"How often I've asked you not to wait for me! I prefer to
breakfast alone, anyhow. It's the dreadful habit of breakfasting
together that causes people to get on together so badly."
"I'd not feel right," said he, moderately, but firmly, "if I
didn't see you at breakfast."
She sat silent--thinking. He felt what she was thinking--how
common this was, how "middle class," how "bourgeois," she was
calling it. "Bourgeois" was her favorite word for all that she
objected to in him, for all she was trying to train out of him by
what she regarded as most artistically indirect lessons. He felt
that their talk about his family, what he had said, had shown he
felt, was recurring to her. He grew red, burned with shame from
head to foot.
"What a fool, what a pup I was!" he said to himself. "If she had
been a real lady--no, by gad--a real WOMAN--she'd have shown that
she despised me."
Again and again that incident had come back to him. It had been,
perhaps, the most powerful factor in his patience with her airs
and condescensions. He felt that it, the lowest dip of his
degradation in snobism, had given her the right to keep him in his
place. It seemed to him one of those frightful crimes against
self-respect which can never be atoned, and, bad as he thought it
from the standpoint of good sense as to the way to get on with
her, he suffered far more because it was such a stinging, scoffing
denial of all his pretenses of personal pride.
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