“I suppose you’re suffering from the virus of sentimental redemption?” she sneered.
Michael was rather startled by her divination.
“What should I redeem her from?”
“I thought you boasted of knowing Lily six years ago?”
“I don’t know that I boasted of it,” he replied, in rather an injured tone. “But I did know her—very well.”
“Couldn’t you foresee what she was bound to become? Personally I should have said that Lily’s future must have been obvious from the time she was five years old. Certainly at seventeen it must have been. You got out of her life then: what the hell’s your object in coming into it again now, as you call it, unless you’re a sentimentalist? People don’t let passion lapse for six years and pick up the broken thread without the help of sentiment.”
Michael in the middle of the increasing tension of the conversation was able to stop for a moment and ask himself if this by chance were true. He was standing by the mantelpiece and tinkling the lusters. Sylvia looked up at him irritably, and he silenced them at once.
“Sentiment about what?” he asked, taking the chair opposite hers.
“You think Lily’s a tart, don’t you? And you think I am, don’t you?”
He frowned at the brutality of the expression.