An embarrassment out of all proportion to the act which produced it held him speechless while he gazed at her. He felt at first merely a sense of physical revolt from the brutality of her self-revelation--from the nakedness to which she had stripped the horror of her marriage under the eyes of her daughter. Nothing, not even the natural impulse to screen one's soul from the gaze of the people with whom one lived, had prevented the appalling indignity of this exposure. The delusion that it is possible for a woman by mere virtue of being a woman to suffer in sweetness and silence, evaporated as he looked at her. He had believed her to be a nonentity, and she was revealing an inner life as intense, as real, as acutely personal as his own. A few words of casual kindness and he had made a slave of her. He regretted it. He was embarrassed. He was sorry. He wished to heaven she hadn't brought him the money--and yet in spite of his regret and his embarrassment, he was profoundly moved. It occurred to him as he took it from her how easy it would have been for Cyrus to have subjugated and satisfied her in the beginning. All it needed was a little kindness, the cheapest virtue, and the tragedy of her ruined soul might have been averted. To make allowances! Ah, that was the philosophy of human relations in a word! If men and women would only stop judging each other and make allowances! "Well, I shan't starve just yet, thanks to you, Aunt Belinda," he said cheerfully enough as he thrust the notes into his pocket. It was a small thing, after all, to make her happy by the sacrifice of his pride. Pride was not, he remembered, included among the Christian virtues, and, besides, as he told himself the next instant, trifling as the sum was, it would at least tide him over financially until he received the next payment for his reviewing. "I'd better go, it's getting late," he said with a return of his old gaiety, while he bent over to kiss her. He was half ashamed of the kiss--not because he was self-conscious about kissing, since he had long since lost that mark of provincialism--but because of the look of passionate gratitude which glowed in her face. Gratitude always made him uncomfortable. It was one of the things he was forever evading and yet forever receiving. He hated it, he had never in his life done anything to deserve it, but he could never escape it.