Money was replaceable.

What the arrangement actually cost me was something I had far less of and could not simply earn more of, and it took me two years to learn its name.

The name, when I finally had it, was not a dramatic word.

It was a small plain one, and the smallness of it was almost insulting after two years of expensive confusion: I had been used, that was all, pleasantly and continuously and by people who would have been genuinely offended to hear it called that.

It cost me my standing.