“I imagine Mr. Durnovo knows all about small-pox. We all do on this coast. He could hardly help recognising it in its earliest stage.”
She turned on him with a smile which he remembered afterwards. At the moment he felt rather abashed, as if he had been caught in a very maze of untruths. He did not meet her eyes. It was a matter of pride with him that he was equal to any social emergency that might arise. He had always deemed himself capable of withholding from the whole questioning world anything that he might wish to withhold. But afterwards—later in his life—he remembered that look in Jocelyn Gordon's face.
“Altogether,” she said, with a peculiar little contented laugh, “I think you cannot keep it up any longer. He ran away from you and left you to fight against it alone. All the same, it was—nice—of you to try and screen him. Very nice, but I do not think that I could have done it myself. I suppose it was—noble—and women cannot be noble.”
“No, it was only expedient. The best way to take the world is to wring it dry—not to try and convert it and make it better, but to turn its vices to account. That method has the double advantage of serving one's purpose at the time, and standing as a warning later. The best way to cure vice is to turn it ruthlessly to one's own account. That is what we are doing with Durnovo. His little idiosyncrasies will turn in witness against him later on.”
She shook her head in disbelief.
“Your practice and your theory do not agree,” she said.
There was a little pause; then she turned to him gravely.
“Have you been vaccinated?” she asked.
“In the days of my baptism, wherein I was made—”
“No doubt,” she interrupted impatiently, “but since? Have you had it done lately?”