"Falk has run away to London with the daughter of Samuel Hogg."
"Samuel Hogg?"
"Yes, the man of the 'Dog and Pilchard' down in Seatown."
"Run away with her?"
"Yesterday. He sent us a letter saying that he had gone up to London to earn his own living, had taken this girl with him, and would marry her next week."
Morris was horrified.
"Without a word of warning? Without speaking to you? Horrible! The daughter of that man.... I know something about him...the worst man in the place."
Then followed a long silence. The effect on Morris was as it had been on Mrs. Brandon--the actual deed was almost lost sight of in the sudden light that it threw on his passion. From the very first the most appealing element of her attraction to him had been her loneliness, the neglect from which she suffered, the need she had of comfort.
He saw her as a woman who, for twenty years, had had no love, although in her very nature she had hungered for it; and if she had not been treated with actual cruelty, at least she had been so basely neglected that cruelty was not far away. It was not true to say that during these months he had grown to hate Brandon, but he had come, more and more, to despise and condemn him. The effeminacy in his own nature had from the first both shrunk from and been attracted by the masculinity in Brandon.
He could have loved that man, but as the situation had forbidden that, his feeling now was very near to hate.