Tom continued to speak only to the third party. "No, the devil I won't!
I don't know why I feel that way about him, but that's the way I feel.
And anyhow, now he knows."
Still addressing the companion only, he uttered a curt "Good-night."
The companion responded civilly with "Good-night" on his side.
He neither looked at Tad, nor flung a word at him. Wheeling to face
what had now blown into a snowstorm, he walked off into its teeth. But
as he went he repeated the question he had put to Hildred Ansley.
"Why do they seem to hate me so?"
He thought of Lily, slippery, snake-like, perverted; he thought of
the mother as he had seen her on that one day, in that one glimpse,
a quivering bundle of agony; he thought of the father, human,
sympathetic, with the iron in his soul.
Then he saw them with their heaped up money, their luxuries, their
pride, their domineering self-importance. He knew just enough of the
lives they led, the exemptions they enjoyed, to feel Honey's protest on
behalf of the dispossessed.
Near an arc-light he stopped abruptly. The snow made a tabernacle for
him, so that he was all alone. As he looked upward and outward millions
and millions of sweet soft white things flew silently across the light.
Out of his heart, up to his lips, there tore the kind of prayer which
in times of temptation the Tollivant habit sometimes wrung from him:
"O God, keep me from ever wanting to be one of them!"