'I will promise never to see her again,' said Bilton.
Suddenly and almost with the vividness of actual hallucination the figure of the man who was so like him rose up before Sybil, and she all but saw Charlie taking Bilton's place there, and imagined that it was he who was saying what Bilton said. For a moment she invested him with the grossness of his double, and loathed and shuddered at the picture she had conjured up. Charlie behaving like Bilton was an image so degrading and humiliating that she could not contemplate it. The very thought was to do him dishonour. But Bilton, so she recognised, was acting now up to his very best; it was the best of his nature which promised not to see Mrs. Emsworth again. But Charlie in a corresponding position was unthinkable. Against this grossness all Sybil's fineness, all her taste, ran up like a wave against a stone sea-jetty, and was broken against it, and the jetty did not know what it had done. She rose, conscious that she was trembling.
'It is a matter of entire indifference to me,' she said, 'when or where or how soon you see her again. I want you to understand that.'
Bilton sat quite unmoved.
'If you were quite certain of yourself, you would not be so violent,' he said. 'You are overstating your feelings; that is because you are rather perplexed as to what they are.'
Sybil turned quickly round to him. She could not help showing her appreciation of this.
'Ah, you are frightfully clever,' she said; 'I do you that justice.'
He rose.
'I shall not give up hope,' he said.
'That is as you please,' she said. 'I have stated as clearly as I can that I can give you none.'