"Intimacy? Yes, I suppose it is intimacy, of a sort."
"And how it could have happened with a man like that—"
"A man like what?"
"Well, my dear girl, a man that Horace wouldn't dream of allowing you to meet, even in his own house."
"Horace? You talk about my being under an obligation. It was he who helped to put me under it."
"And how?"
"By never delivering one of my messages to him; by letting him believe that I behaved horribly to him; that I sent him away and never gave him a thought—when he had been so magnificent. There were a thousand things I wanted to explain and set right; and I asked Horace for an opportunity and he never gave it me. He can't blame me if I take it now."
"If Horace did all these things, he did them for the best possible reasons. He knows rather more of this young man than you do, or could have any idea of. I don't know what he is now, but he was, at one time, thoroughly disreputable."
"Whatever did he do?"
"Do? He did everything. He drank; he ran after the worst sort of women—he mixes now with the lowest class of journalists in town; he lived for months, Horace says, with a horrid little actress in the next house to this."