Haughty made of his shoulders the most prodigious hunch. "What importance, under the sun, has the trust of women—in numbers however prodigious? It's never what's best in a man they trust—it's exactly what's worst, what's most irrelevant to anything or to any class but themselves. Their kind of confidence," he further elucidated, "is concerned only with the effect of their own operations or with those to which they are subject; it has no light either for a man's other friends or for his enemies: it proves nothing about him but in that particular and wholly detached relation. So neither hate me nor like me, please, for anything any woman may tell you."
Horton's hand had on this renewed and emphasised its proposal of good-night; to which his host acceded with the remark: "What superfluous precautions you take!"
"How can you call them superfluous," he asked in answer to this, "when you've been taking them at such a rate yourself?—in the interest, I mean, of trying to persuade me that you can't stand on your feet?"
"It hasn't been to show you that I'm silly about life—which is what you've just been talking of. It has only been to show you that I'm silly about affairs," Gray said as they went at last through the big bedimmed hall to the house doors, which stood open to the warm summer night under the protection of the sufficient outward reaches.
"Well, what are affairs but life?" Vinty, at the top of the steps, sought to know.
"You'll make me feel, no doubt, how much they are—which would be very good for me. Only life isn't affairs—that's my subtle distinction," Gray went on.
"I'm not sure, I'm not sure!" said Horton while he looked at the stars.
"Oh rot—I am!" Gray happily declared; to which he the next moment added: "What it makes you contend for, you see, is the fact of my silliness."
"Well, what is that but the most splendid fact about you, you jolly old sage?"—and his visitor, getting off, fairly sprang into the shade of the shrubberies.