“There is no way out,” Sên King-lo declared, “none that I can take, or will. If your cousin—you have spoken to her, of course, or will——”
“I have spoken to Ivy,” Snow told him grimly, “and made matters worse, if I did anything. She’ll not budge an inch. But you—you are reasonable. You will listen to what I have to say?”
“To every word of it and as long as you like.”
Snow plunged into his arguments—most of them the old ones that every student of “East and West” has heard again and again, and that dozens of pens have twisted and turned into well-grimed shreds. And, quite without offensiveness, he cut very much deeper into physical things—revulsions, apparent, if not actual, abnormality, and so on—than often a pen has dared to do.
In some points, Sên agreed; most he rejected or claimed to be outweighed.
“I saw it as you do, on the whole—until—the other day,” he admitted; “but I see it differently now.”
“You would,” Sir Charles said with a smile that was grim but patient and not unkind.
“I did not know—not until a short time ago—how it was with me. It took me quite by surprise.”
“It frequently does.”
“I was a dunce, of course, not to know where I was drifting.”