Ruth dropped her cigarette on the floor and trod on it Martin watched her. "How many times have you been in love, Ruth? Did you ever find a sense of humour much of a help?"
Ruth ignored this. She seemed about to add something else about Jenny or Jenny's family, but checked herself.
"And take you, for instance!" she went on, with soft and tender satire. "Do you remember what you said on Thursday night?"
Now the ability of a woman to remember some trivial remark, made possibly decades before, is a weapon which cannot be met
"You said if you ever found Jenny again, and she was engaged, you'd use any trick, however underhand, to get her back again. And what, as it happened, did you actually do?
"Darling, your fair-play-and-no-advantages attitude was ridiculous. If Ricky Fleet hadn't been up to his ears with Susan Harwood, there'd have been trouble. You insisted on keeping your word about the vigil here, though I was a cat and tried to make Jenny even more jealous, than she is.
"Look at your best, or rather your most popular, work! Look at your fencing! Look at Stevenson! You're an old-fashioned romanticist that's what you are, only temperamental and a bit crazy."
Ruth said all this in a low voice, speaking more quickly as she went on. Martin dropped his own cigarette and crushed it out
"What you say," he retorted, "may be true. If it is, if s no very deep damnation. Your friend Stannard…" "Oh, Martin!"
"Why do you say, 'oh, Martin' like that?"