"Isn't there in life often a conflict between them?" asked Anikin. "In practical life, I mean. You know Tennyson's lines:
"His honour rooted in dishonour stood
And faith unfaithful made him falsely true."
"Now I understand," thought Arkright, "he is going to pretend that he is in the position of Lancelot to Elaine, and plead a prior loyalty to a Guinevere that no longer counts."
"I think," he said, "in that case one cannot help remaining 'falsely true.'" That is, he thought, what he wants me to say.
"One cannot, that is to say, disregard the past," said Anikin.
"No, one can't," said Arkright, as if he had entirely accepted the Russian's complicated fiction.
He wanted, at the same time, to give him a hint that he was not quite so easily deceived as all that.
"Isn't it a curious thought," he said, "how often people invoke the engagements of a past which they have comfortably disregarded up to that moment when they no longer wish to face an obligation in the present, like a man who in order to avoid meeting a new debt suddenly points to an old debt as something sacred, which up till that moment he had completely disregarded, and indeed, forgotten?"
Anikin laughed.
"Why are you laughing?" asked Arkright.