I've got to get it used to the idea of me as a common workingman with overalls and a dinner pail." She saw beneath his attempt to make light of the situation a deep and cruel humiliation.

He was looking forward to the keenest torture to which a man trained in vanity to false ideals can be subjected; and the thing itself, so Adelaide was thinking, would be more cruel than his writhing anticipation of it.
"Still," she insisted to him, "you are brave.

You might have borrowed of mother and gone off to make one failure after another in gentlemanly attempts.

You might have"-- she was going to say, "tried to make a rich marriage," but stopped herself in time.

"Oh, I forgot," she said, instead, "there's the five thousand dollars.