"You won't forgive father?"
Christopher said:
"I won't forgive father for not making a will. I won't forgive him for calling in Ruggles. I saw him and you in the writing-room the night before he died. He never spoke to me. He could have. It was clumsy stupidity. That's unforgiveable."
"The fellow shot himself," Mark said. "You usually forgive a fellow who shoots himself."
"I don't," Christopher said. "Besides he's probably in heaven and don't need my forgiveness. Ten to one he's in heaven. He was a good man."
"One of the best," Mark said. "It was I that called in Ruggles though."
"I don't forgive you either," Christopher said.
"But you must," Mark said—and it was a tremendous concession to sentimentality—"take enough to make you comfortable."
"By God!" Christopher exclaimed. "I loathe your whole beastly buttered toast, mutton-chopped, carpet-slippered, rum-negused comfort as much as I loathe your beastly Riviera-palaced, chauffeured, hydraulic-lifted, hot-house aired beastliness of fornication. . . ." He was carried away, as he seldom let himself be, by the idea of his amours with Valentine Wannop which should take place on the empty boards of a cottage, without draperies, fat meats, gummy aphrodisiacs. . . . "You won't," he repeated, "be a penny the poorer by me."
Mark said: