if I continued to send you money. With the small amounts I can afford to give you you certainly would not be able to live a life of luxury, but you could live a life of idleness so that it would be a simple matter for you to fall into bad habits and evil ways. The cheque I am enclosing in this letter, therefore, is the last I shall send.
It has been very difficult for me to write this letter, but I know the weaknesses in your nature. It is for you to rise superior to these, and if you are a real man you will do so. Always, my dear boy, you have my love and that of your mother.
Raising his eyes from the last lines of this letter, Byron stared hopelessly out of his little window. Only a blank wall rewarded his vision, a wall erected so near the window that even on bright days he could only see to read by the aid of a gas-jet. His soul was full of resentment, the more so because he recognized the justice of his father's words, the calm of his epistolary tone: a maddening, judicial calm. It's bad enough to know all this without having it rubbed in, he muttered to himself. His mind reverted to the sordid episode at which his father had tactfully hinted. There had been an unfortunate affair with a servant-girl at college, but his father had never heard of that or of many other adventures of which he had been the sorry hero. The incident to which his father referred had occurred only last summer in Philadelphia. He had become involved in an affair with a married woman, an affair of which the woman's husband had
