"Well, you can get away. To Agaye."
"Not as much as I should like. My wife can't stand more than six weeks of it."
"So that you aren't really happy at Agaye…. I thought I was the only person who felt like that. Miserable because I've been doing my own things instead of sewing, or reading to Mamma."
"That's the way conscience makes cowards of us all."
"If it was even my conscience. But it's Mamma's. And her conscience was
Grandmamma's. And Grandmamma's—"
"And mine?"
"Isn't yours a sort of landlord's conscience? Your father's?"
"No. No. It's mine all right. My youth had a conscience."
"Are you sure it wasn't put off with somebody else's?"
"Perhaps. At Oxford we were all social reformers. The collective conscience of the group, perhaps. I wasn't strong enough to rise to it. Wasn't strong enough to resist it…."