"Do—" muttered Pendleton, with a dark abstraction in his look, "I’d like to tell you what I’d like to do to such as you—but it isn’t worth while. This namby-pamby, mollycoddle, rotten doll-life favors you. Do! If I had the money, I’d get so far away I couldn’t even think of insects like you." "Then you realize you are no more fit to take Laura’s children than you’re fit to live among decent people?" He was silent for a moment, with the abstraction merging into cunning in his eye, and that in turn, as though cunning were of no avail, fading into heaviness. "They’ll become like you," he finally answered with the somber trace of a sneer. "There’s the oldest boy—I wish—I’d make a man of him." A snort of derision from Griselda interrupted. "You mean a criminal," I put in, in spite of myself. "Well, you can’t, Pendleton. Lift a finger and as surely as you sit there, I’ll prosecute you—children or no children. Don’t forget I have witnesses." He gazed at me open-mouthed with half-defiance, half-alarm on his moist fleshy countenance. "That’s your little scheme, is it?" he muttered sardonically. "Only if you drive me to it!" "Blackmail, eh?" I laughed at him. "What’s the use of being melodramatic, Pendleton? You are hardly the one to talk like that." "Where’s the money Laura left?" he snapped with truculent sharpness, and I experienced a pang of pain to hear her name upon his lips. Nevertheless, I answered him evenly: "That exists intact—about nineteen hundred dollars. It’s the children’s, unless I should need it for their education. I am the executor." "Give me a thousand of that!" he cried passionately, yet with a tentative uncertainty in his voice, "and I’ll go where I’ll never see your face again!" "That’s a consummation, Pendleton—but of that not a penny!" "Executor!" he repeated with vicious bitterness—"with your little laws and safeguards. God! How I hate you all! God! To be again where real men are—who move—and laugh—and live! Peddling mollycoddles—caged white mice! Damn you! I wish to God I had never met any of you!" "You don’t know how often I have wished that," I murmured, but he paid no heed. "Lord! I want to be again where the sun shines, where a man can take a chance! I wish to God I had never met that moldy old rotten Dibdin! I was going into the commission business with an Englishman at Osaka—or I could have gone into one of the mines of Kuhara in Korea—copper—made a fortune!"—he spoke as if he were vehemently thinking aloud—"but that plausible rotter Dibdin came along—dragged me away—and I had a hankering for the lights of Broadway. Broadway! What have I seen of it? Want to put me in a cage—in a flat! Hell, man! Give me a thousand dollars—and let me—I’ll pay it back!"