"What do you mean by honour?" Miriam inquired, when there had been a short silence.
"Honour?"
"Your definitions are not generally those accepted by most people."
"I hope not." He smiled. "But you know sufficiently what I mean. Deception, for instance, is incompatible with what I understand as honour."
He spoke it slowly and clearly, his eyes fixed on the fire.
"You seem to me to be attributing moral responsibility to her."
"What I say is this that I believe her nature incapable of admitting the vulgar influences to which people in general are subject. I attach no merit to her high qualities—no more than I attach merit to the sea for being a nobler thing than a muddy puddle. Of course I know that she cannot help being what she is, and cannot say to herself that in future she will become this or that. How am I inconsistent? Suppose me wrong in my estimate of her. I might then lament that she fell below what I had imagined, but of course I should have no right to blame her."
Miriam reflected; then put the question:
"And does she hold the same opinion—with reference to you, for instance?"
"Theoretically she does."