In a flash the thought went through his listener: “There it is! Ownerships! Well, we all own things. But—human beings! Pah!”
“You have to look at facts,” he said drily, “or rather the want of them.”
Soames gave him another quick suspicious look.
“The want of them?” he said. “Yes, but I am not so sure.”
“I beg your pardon,” replied Jolyon; “I’ve told you what she said. It was explicit.”
“My experience has not been one to promote blind confidence in her word. We shall see.”
Jolyon got up.
“Good-bye,” he said curtly.
“Good-bye,” returned Soames; and Jolyon went out trying to understand the look, half-startled, half-menacing, on his cousin’s face. He sought Waterloo Station in a disturbed frame of mind, as though the skin of his moral being had been scraped; and all the way down in the train he thought of Irene in her lonely flat, and of Soames in his lonely office, and of the strange paralysis of life that lay on them both. “In chancery!” he thought. “Both their necks in chancery—and her’s so pretty!”