“A few months,” he kept saying to himself. It seemed to him that a sudden indifference to everything else, to all things greater and more distant, had come into his mind. For the first time in his life he was self-engrossed, self-absorbed, able to think of nothing but his own necessities, and what he was to do. So strange was this to Edgar, so miserable did he feel it, that even on the short journey from one room to another he made an effort to shake off the sudden chains with which this sudden necessity had bound him, and was appalled by his own weakness, almost by a sense of guilt, when he found that he could take no interest whatever in Mr. Tottenham, that he could think of nothing but himself. For the first time, there was nobody but himself involved; no justice to be done, no kindness to be shown to others. Wherever other people are concerned, a certain breadth, a certain freedom and largeness, come into the question, even though the other people may be poor and small enough; but how mean the generous man feels, how petty and miserable, when he, and he only, becomes by any twist of fortune the centre of all his thoughts! CHAPTER XIII. A new Friend. “I hope I should have done exactly as you did in that Arden business,” said Mr. Tottenham; “but I can’t tell. The amount of meanness and falseness to all one’s own rules which one feels in one’s self in a great emergency is wonderful. I never put any dependence on myself. Now I will tell who, or rather what I am. The pronoun Who is inappropriate in my case. I am nobody; but when you know what I am--if, indeed, my name does not tell you--” “No,” said Edgar, forcing himself into attention. “It is not a bad name; there are fine people, I believe, who bear it, and who hold up their heads with the best. But if you belonged to a middle-class London family, and had a mother and sisters, you would have no difficulty in identifying me. I am not a Tottenham with a Christian name like other people. I am Tottenham’s, in the possessive case.” “I begin to understand,” said Edgar. What an effort it was to him! But he grew more capable of making the effort as he tried to make it, and actually looked up now with a gleam of intelligence in his eye.