"A chance at what?" I asked bluntly.
"Well, whatever it is men are given a chance about. Don't, please, be thick-headed, Ronnie. I suppose he wants to get back."
"What, into the divorce court again!"
Iris jumped up from her chair, and there was no smile on the face she turned to me.
"I think you are being horrible about him, perfectly beastly. And you say you are a friend of his!..."
"Iris, for the Lord's sake don't let us get dramatic about Antony—and we can't do it half so well as he can, anyway." And as she turned away with that little grimace of contempt that she reserved for peculiarly tiresome people, I got up from my chair the better to defend myself. And I was getting very hot and bothered about the whole thing, too. "Don't you see that it's exactly because I'm a friend of his and know him pretty well that I know all this 'getting back' talk is simply stuff?" I put to her. "My dear, I've been 'sympathetic' about Antony for years, but it's never done him or myself any good—simply because there's never one circumstance in life when he will give up his vanities and bravadoes, he's so full of silly contempt that he will never even compromise. It's not possible to help a man who won't help himself...."
"The one after that in my copy-book was 'every cloud has a silver lining,'" Iris said dangerously.
"You are being unfair about Antony," she said. "You aren't allowing for the least change in him since he went away. And you are judging him entirely by his old weaknesses, without giving him any credit for new thoughts and—and longings...." I couldn't help grimly thinking of the quickly emptied decanter the night before, but I didn't interrupt. Iris is following a theory, I thought, and she won't find herself out until she has made a pet-dog of it and it makes a mess of her cushions.
"It's a perfectly human desire to want to get back into the world," she said. "Not, of course, the silly dull world, but that of affairs and the like. The city, for instance...."
"Anyway, Iris, your intentions are very honourable—but what are you going to do about it? How will you begin?"