I said I only meant that she was compromised. At any rate, that was what it looked like to her people and to everybody to whom it mattered.
"If you will persist in taking the ugliest view of it, of course it'll look like that. I can't help how it looks to a set of old ladies and clergymen in Canterbury. Come to that, it matters a damned sight more to me than it can to any of you people."
I said he wouldn't say so if he knew how he had made them suffer.
He laughed out at that.
"Suffer? They haven't suffered a quarter as much as I have. Not a hundredth part as much. They've suffered thinking of themselves—of their precious respectability. I've suffered thinking of her.
"Suffer? I've been through all that. It wasn't right, Furnival, it wasn't right for anybody to have to go through what I did. But I've come out of it. You've been pretty hard on me with your infernal virtue; but if you think you can make me suffer more, you can't. I'm past it."
I said I was sorry if I seemed too hard on him. But it would be well if he tried to look at his really very outrageous behaviour as it was bound to appear to other people.
"You admit, then," he said, "that it appears more outrageous than it is?"
I said, "You see, my dear fellow, I don't yet know what it is."
He asked me if I'd like to know what it was? And I told him that, certainly, some sort of an account was owing and that he'd better perhaps make a clean breast of it while he was about it.