"But let that pass.
"You couldn't get her because you didn't give your mind to it. You didn't know how to get her and you didn't try to find out. You set about it the wrong way. I told you ages ago that a man's a fool if he wants a thing and doesn't find out how to get it. You should have begun by trying to find out something about her. But you didn't try. With all your opportunities you haven't found out anything. You don't know the least thing about her. You don't know what she wants, you don't know what she's thinking, or what she's feeling, or what she'll do—how she'll behave if you propose to her three times running. She's told you things and you haven't understood them or tried to understand. Because the whole blessed time you were thinking about yourself, or what she was thinking about you, or was going to think. Whereas I haven't been thinking about anything but her—I've been studying her straight on end for ten months and I've found out a little bit about her. At any rate, I jolly well know what she wants and I jolly well know how to give it her.
"You see, I was determined to get her, and I left no stone unturned. I took trouble."
I suggested that I'd taken trouble enough in all conscience. He laughed.
"You only took trouble to get her away, old man, when she wanted to be here with me. What do you suppose I brought her here for? Would you have ever thought of letting her come with you? Of giving her what she wanted to that extent? Not you! You'd only have thought of shutting her up and protecting her for your own wretched sake—which was the last thing she wanted. She'd had about enough of that."
I replied that certainly I should have thought of protecting a young girl before everything else; that it never would have occurred to me to compromise her in order to marry her—even if I did find I couldn't marry her in any other way.
I had hit him there. He was quiet for a little while after it. I didn't look at him—I didn't want to look at him—but I could feel him there, breathing hard from the shock of it, with his mouth a little open.
Presently he took the thing up again. He went on, placably, quietly explaining. "I thought of protecting her too. Only I wasn't such an idiot as to think of it before everything else."
"No. You were clever enough to think of it afterwards—when you'd got what you wanted. When you had compromised her."
"I suppose you mean there was only one thing I wanted? There, Furnival, you lie."