I will not come any more." He bowed, and Mrs.Mandel said, "Of course, it's only your action that I am concerned with." She seemed to him merely triumphant, and he could not conceive what it had cost her to nerve herself up to her too easy victory.

He left Mrs.
Mandel to a far harder lot than had fallen to him, and he went away hating her as an enemy who had humiliated him at a moment when he particularly needed exalting.

It was really very simple for him to stop going to see Christine Dryfoos, but it was not at all simple for Mrs.
Mandel to deal with the consequences of his not coming.

He only thought how lightly she had stopped him, and the poor woman whom he had left trembling for what she had been obliged to do embodied for him the conscience that accused him of unpleasant things.
"By heavens! this is piling it up," he said to himself through his set teeth, realizing how it had happened right on top of that stupid insult from Mrs.Horn.Now he should have to give up his place on 'Every Other Week; he could not keep that, under the circumstances, even if some pretence were not made to get rid of him; he must hurry and anticipate any such pretence; he must see Fulkerson at once; he wondered where he should find him at that hour.

He thought, with bitterness so real that it gave him a kind of tragical satisfaction, how certainly he could find him a little later at Mrs.Leighton's; and Fulkerson's happiness became an added injury.
The thing had, of course, come about just at the wrong time.