“Demonstrably.”
“And yet somehow, when one really thinks about him, he seems so sweetly reasonable.”
“Sweetly reasonable!” The vicar pinned down the unfortunate phrase. “How can you say that? A mild and harmless creature, perhaps—apart from his opinions—but reasonable!—surely that is the very last word to apply to him.”
Perplexity deepened upon Edith’s face. “Somehow, I can’t throw off the curious impression he has left upon me.”
“Try to forget the man.” The vicar spoke sternly.
“Dismiss him from your thoughts, at any rate while the case is sub judice. You have done your duty by reporting the matter to me, and I am doing mine by putting in motion proper machinery to deal with it.”
“I sincerely hope that nothing is going to happen to him.”
“He will be sent to an asylum.”
Edith shivered. “Oh, I hope not,” she said, drawing in her breath sharply. “To my mind that is the cruellest fate that can overtake any human being.”
“One doesn’t altogether agree,” said the vicar. “He will be taken care of as he ought to be, and treated, of course, with the greatest humanity. You must remember that asylums are very different places from what they were sixty years ago, when Dickens—I think it was Dickens—wrote about them.”