He sat down in Union Square to consider his position, and he came to a very rapid and positive conclusion. He declared to himself: "I will no longer waste my life. Denasia and I have made a great mistake. Together, we shall be poor and miserable. Apart, we shall be happy. I no longer love her. I do not believe she loves me. All the love she can spare from her blustering father and mother she wastes on that miserable sickly babe, who would be a thousand times better dead than alive. If I leave her she will go back to St. Penfer. I have a hundred dollars; I will give her fifty of them. She can pay a steerage passage out of it or go in a sailing-vessel, or if she does not like that way she has things she can sell. If I give her half of what I have I do very well indeed." He went rapidly to his home, or room. He knew that Denasia had an engagement to keep, and he hoped that he might be fortunate enough to find her out. It was as he wished: Denasia had gone out and the landlady was sitting beside the baby's cradle. Roland dismissed her with that manner all women declared to be charming, and then he sat down and wrote a letter to his wife. It did not occupy him ten minutes. Some of his clothing was yet very good and fashionable; he packed it in the leather trap which had gone with him to college, and then he sent a little girl for a cab. Without word and without observation he drove away from the scene of so much vexation and disappointment. The whole life and vicinity had suddenly become horrible to him--Denasia, his child, the shabby landlady, the shabby house, the dirty little grocery at the corner where he had bought his cigars and their small household supplies, the meals cooked there and eaten there, Denasia's attempts at housekeeping--the whole series of memories made him wince and shiver with shame and annoyance. "Thank God it is over!" he said fervently. And he never once thought what an insult he was offering to eternal mercy and justice, in supposing God had anything whatever to do with his flagrant desertion of duty, his shameful abrogation of all the consequences of his own wilful selfishness, and his cruel farewell to the wife and son he was bound to nourish and cherish and defend.