The Fortune Hunter by Vance, Louis Joseph, 1879-1933

"There," said he, singling out a passer-by upon whose complacent features prosperity had set its smug hall-mark--"there, but for the grace of God, goes Nat Duncan!" He rolled the paraphrase upon his tongue and found it bitter--not, however, with a tonic bitterness. "Lord, what a worthless critter I am! No good to myself--nor to anybody else. Even on Harry I'm a drag--a regular old man of the mountains!"

Despondently he went down to the sidewalk and merged himself with the crowd, moving with it though a thousand miles apart from it, and presently diverging, struck across-town toward the Worth Street subway station.

"And the worst of it is, he's too sharp not to find it out--if he hasn't by this time--and too damn' decent by far to let me know if he has! ... It can't go on this way with us: I can't let him ... Got to break with him somehow--now--to-day. I won't let him think me ... what I've been all along to him.... Bless his foolish heart!..."

This resolution coloured his reverie throughout the uptown journey. And he strengthened himself with it, deriving a sort of acrid comfort from the knowledge that henceforth none should know the burden of his misfortunes save himself. There was no deprecation of Kellogg's goodness in his mood, simply determination no longer to be a charge upon it. To contemplate the sum total of the benefits he had received at Kellogg's hands, since the day when the latter had found him ill and half-starved, friendless as a stray pup, on the bench in Washington Square, staggered his imagination. He could never repay it, he told himself, save inadequately, little by little--mostly by gratitude and such consideration as he purposed now to exhibit by removing himself and his distresses from the other's ken. Here was an end to comfort for him, an end to living in Kellogg's rooms, eating his food, busying his servants, spending his money--not so much borrowed as pressed upon him. He stood at the cross-roads, but in no doubt as to which way he should most honourably take, though it took him straight back to that from which Kellogg had rescued him.