He paused.
"At the present moment there's hardly any one—of our generation, mind you—who counts except you and I."
He paused again.
"If you and I have done anything decent it's because, first of all, our families have cast us off."
"Mine hasn't yet."
"It's only a question of time if you go on," said Tanqueray.
He had never seen Jane's family. He knew vaguely that her father was the rector of a small parish in Dorset, and that he had had two wives in such rapid succession that their effect from a distance, so Tanqueray said, was scandalously simultaneous. The rector, indeed, had married his first wife for the sake of a child, and his second for the child's sake. He had thus achieved a younger family so numerous that it had kept him from providing properly for Jane. It was what Tanqueray called the "consecrated immorality" of Jane's father that had set Jane free.
Tanqueray's father was a retired colonel. A man of action, of rash and inconsiderate action, he regarded Tanqueray with a disapproval so warm and generous that it left the young man freer, if anything, than Jane.
"Anyhow," he went on, "we haven't let ourselves be drawn in. And yet that's our temptation, yours and mine."
Again he paused.