He twisted his moustache and hesitated. "Well, there you have me," he admitted at last. "If a man does what he did, as a gentleman he must stand to be damned for it."
"Godfrey's free to go, of course—that's our bargain. But you wouldn't have made a bargain like that?"
"I would not, Winnie. To do me justice, I believe I'd think it enough to be ruining one woman, without providing for my liberty to ruin another as soon as I wanted to."
Winnie laid her hand on his arm for a moment. "How pleasantly we quarrel!" she said.
"And why wouldn't we?" he asked, with native surprise that a quarrel should be considered a thing inherently unpleasant. "Ah, here come Stephen and Alice, back from church! I'll go and run races with her, and get an appetite for lunch."
Stephen lounged up, his pipe in full blast.
"Stephen, how is it that this old world gets on at all, with everybody at loggerheads with everybody else?"
"I've often considered that. The solution is economic—purely economic, Winnie. You see, people must eat."
"So far the Court is with you, Stephen."
"And in anything except a rudimentary state of society they must feed one another. Because no man has the genius to make for himself all the things he wants to eat. Consequently—I put the argument summarily—you will find that, broadly speaking, all the burning and bludgeoning and fighting, all the killing in short, and equally all the refraining from killing, are in the end determined by the consideration whether your action one way or the other will seriously affect your supply of food—to which, in civilized society, you may add clothes, and so on."