SEPTIMA. They let Jenkins starve. They didn’t worry about him.
OLIVER. Of course they didn’t, they weren’t even born.
WILLIAM. The whole question is extremely difficult. We may require an arbitrator, or, at any rate, a qualified chartered accountant.
MARION. Yes, that would be better, dear. To let somebody else decide what is fair and what isn’t.
ISOBEL (in a low voice). Oh, it’s horrible ... horrible.
MARION. What, dear?
ISOBEL. The way you talk—about the money. As if all that we had lost was so much money. As if you could estimate the wrong that Oliver Blayds did to his friend in the terms of money. I said the money was tainted. It is. How can you bear to touch it? How can you bear to profit by such a betrayal?
SEPTIMA. That’s pure sentiment, Aunt Isobel. Quite apart from not being reasonable, it isn’t even practical. [238]Where are you going to draw the line? If you’re going to throw the money away, then you’ve got to throw the house away and everything in the house away—all our clothes to begin with. Because everything—everything that belongs to us owes itself to that betrayal of seventy years ago.... We should look very funny, the five of us, walking out of the house to-morrow, with nothing on, and starting life all over again.
MARION. Septima, dear, I don’t think that’s quite——
(SEPTIMA begins to laugh to herself at the picture of them.)