As soon as she has a little knowledge of the world she'll not expect me to marry her.

She can get something to do.
I'll help her." And now he felt in conceit with himself again--felt that he was going to be a good, generous friend to her.
"Perhaps you'll be better off--once you get started," said he.
"I don't see how I could be worse off.

What is there here for _me_ ?" He wondered at the good sense of this from a mere child.

It was most unlikely that any man of the class she had been brought up in would marry her; and how could she endure marriage with a man of the class in which she might possibly find a husband?
As for reputation-- She, an illegitimate child, never could have a reputation, at least not so long as she had her looks.

After supper, to kill time, he had dropped in at Willett's drug store, where the young fellows loafed and gossiped in the evenings; all the time he was there the conversation had been made up of sly digs and hints about graveyard trysts, each thrust causing the kind of laughter that is the wake of the prurient and the obscene.