Lord Dennis continued very dryly and with a touch of malice:
“You are not listening to me; but I can see very well that the process has begun already underneath. There's a curious streak of the Jesuit in you, Eustace. What you don't want to see, you won't look at.”
“You advise me, then, to compromise?”
“On the contrary, I point out that you will be compromising if you try to keep both your conscience and your love. You will be seeking to have, it both ways.”
“That is interesting.”
“And you will find yourself having it neither,” said Lord Dennis sharply.
Miltoun rose. “In other words, you, like the others, recommend me to desert this lady who loves me, and whom I love. And yet, Uncle, they say that in your own case——”
But Lord Dennis had risen, too, having lost all the appanage and manner of old age.
“Of my own case,” he said bluntly, “we won't talk. I don't advise you to desert anyone; you quite mistake me. I advise you to know yourself. And I tell you my opinion of you—you were cut out by Nature for a statesman, not a lover! There's something dried-up in you, Eustace; I'm not sure there isn't something dried-up in all our caste. We've had to do with forms and ceremonies too long. We're not good at taking the lyrical point of view.”
“Unfortunately,” said Miltoun, “I cannot, to fit in with a theory of yours, commit a baseness.”