Carleigh only nodded, still looking at the fire. And then there was another pause, which Kneedrock broke eventually with: "We're awfully primitive.... Still Nina's story wasn't strictly primitive. It was all warped and twisted by civilization.
"In the stone age things would have been different. The troglodyte would have clubbed Darling, and later, if the lady played tricks, he would have ended her in the same way. That's how to manage women."
He stretched out his iron hand and wrist and looked at them—his right hand and wrist, not the scarred ones. "I hate civilization," he said then suddenly. "I hate honor, and noblesse oblige, and all such tommyrot. It's the ruin of the race."
He spoke slowly now, but with a frightful bitterness.
"Yes," said Carleigh, sympathy swelling quick, "we've gone a long way from the truth of existence."
"It isn't any use going on a wild-goose chase after happiness in these times," Kneedrock went on. "You can't cure your ills, nowadays. I tried to help myself once, and made the worst kind of a mess of it. Go back to your wife, or go off with your mother-in-law, but don't imagine that either course is going to help you to happiness. Because it isn't."
Carleigh was looking Nibbetts straight in the eyes now.
"And yet," he said frankly, "I think that I could be happy—quite happy—with Mrs. Darling."
"No, you couldn't," returned the viscount sharply—gruffly, in fact. "You couldn't. She's too shallow."
"Shallow?"