He would return to the 'Cat and Whistle'-- he would keep his promise and marry Norah Geraghty--he would go utterly to destruction, and then Mrs.Woodward would know and feel what she had done in banishing him from her daughter's presence! Having arrived at this magnanimous resolution after a fortnight's doubt and misery, he proceeded to put his purpose into execution.
It was now some considerable time since he had been at the 'Cat and Whistle;' he had had no further visit from Mrs.Davis, but he had received one or two notes both from her and Norah, to which, as long as he had Katie's purse, he was resolute in not replying; messages also had reached him from the landlady through Dick Scatterall, in the last of which he was reminded that there was a trifle due at the bar, and another trifle for money lent.
One night, having lashed himself up to a fit state of wretched desperation, he found himself at the well-known corner of the street leading out of the Strand.

On his journey thither he had been trying to realize to himself what it would be to be the husband of Norah Geraghty; what would be the joy of returning to a small house in some dingy suburb and finding her to receive him.

Could he really love her when she would be bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh, the wife of his bosom and the mother of his children?
In such a case would he ever be able to forget that he had known Katie Woodward?
Would those words of hers ever ring in his ears, then as now--'You will be steady, dear Charley; won't you ?' There are those who boast that a gentleman must always be a gentleman; that a man, let him marry whom he will, raises or degrades his wife to the level of his own condition, and that King Cophetua could share his throne with a beggar-woman without sullying its splendour or diminishing its glory.

How a king may fare in such a condition, the author, knowing little of kings, will not pretend to say; nor yet will he offer an opinion whether a lowly match be fatally injurious to a marquess, duke, or earl; but this he will be bold to affirm, that a man from the ordinary ranks of the upper classes, who has had the nurture of a gentleman, prepares for himself a hell on earth in taking a wife from any rank much below his own--a hell on earth, and, alas! too often another hell elsewhere also.

He must either leave her or loathe her.