"And it's me you're hard on. You were always hard. You say you condone things, but you condone nothing, and you're not good yourself."
"No, I'm not good myself. But there is conduct and conduct. I can condone everything but the fraud you're practising on this innocent man." He rose. "It's—well—you see, it's such a beastly shame."
It was to be a battle of brains, and she had foiled him with the indomitable stupidity of her passion. But his point—the one point that he stuck to—was a sword point for her passion.
"You won't tell him? You won't? It would be a blackguardly thing to do."
"If Lucy was a friend of mine I'm afraid the blackguardly thing would be to hold my tongue."
"You'd tell him then?" she said. "You wouldn't think of me?"
She came to him. She laid her arms upon his shoulders. Her hands touched him with dispassionate, deliberate, ineffectual caresses, a pitiful return to a discarded manner, an outrageous imitation of the old professional cajoleries. It was so poor a thing that it had no power to move him. What moved him was the look in her eyes, the look which his brain told him was the desperate, incredulous appeal of her unhappy soul.
"I don't know, Kitty," he said. "Thank heaven, he's not a friend of mine."