"Crazy!" gasped the old man. "Do be quiet! Let me get you something more to eat."
"A thief, at your service. Oh, don't start! I'll not carry away your mahogany sideboard nor your bronze chandelier. I steal only to keep myself in purse--to eat. You dig to add to the column of figures in your pass book. I walk among the gods. My brain is worth twenty gray bags like yours. I have thoughts and dreams in terms to you unintelligible. I can live more in a week than haply you have done in the course of your whole crawling existence. What do you know of the spirit? Behind your altar sits a calf of gold. You grovel before it and slip out at the bottom the shekels you drop in at the top. To you the moon will always be made of green cheese, that 'orbed maiden with white fire laden'! Your hands are callous from counting money, your brain is----"
The old fellow arose. "Leave my house! Get out of here!"
He was an absurd figure, not more than five feet high, in his black broadcloth suit and string tie, as he faced McCartney's blazing eyes, and the latter laughed at him.
"I will fast enough. But you see I'm having a sensation--_living_. I'm doing good. Oh, yes, I am. If not to you, at least to myself. Do you think I'll ever forget little 'Cathie'? God! How I could have loved a real child! And I've only a cat." He laughed again. "I don't blame you for thinking me crazy--even you. Come, now, wasn't my picture of the phthisic wife and moaning child worth a place on the line--I mean, wasn't it good, eh? Worth more than two beggarly quarters? It gave me a thrill--what I need--it'll keep me alive for another twenty-four hours, without this." He held up a nickel-plated hypodermic syringe. It shone in the gaslight, and the old man started back and held out his hands.
"Don't shoot!" he cried in senile terror.
"Carrion!" cried McCartney. "Why do I waste my time on you? Why? Because I'm in your debt. I owe you little Catherine. I shall never forget her. And you, you--you are her foster father! God forbid!"
The old man sat down resignedly at the extreme side of the table.
"By God, I pity you!" exclaimed the lean man. "Do you hear that? _I_ pity _you_--_I_!--a wretched, drugged, wilted, useless bundle of nerves twisted into the image of a man; a chap born with a silver spoon, with gifts, who tossed them all into the gutter--threw 'a pearl away richer than all his tribe'; a miserable creature who can't live without this" (he pressed the needles into his wrist), "and yet I wouldn't change with you! I'm more of a man than you. My very wants are sweeter than any joys your brutish senses can ever feel.