"That would mean your complete exposure."
"I'm prepared for that."
"You said the other night that you only wanted to see and talk to her. You said you'd go no further than that. Do you call what happened this afternoon keeping your word?"
"I meant what I said at the time. You know that I honestly hadn't a thought of deceiving you. I'm afraid that word can't be kept. Perhaps I hadn't quite realised."
"Have you realised yet?"
"Oh!"
"You haven't. Let me help you. And I'll put it as much in your favour as I can. I'll assume you're standing still for the present. I'll even assume the other possibility, or impossibility, whichever it is—that you might actually turn round again. Even then what would it mean? It would mean that I, a guest of my old friends, was lending my countenance to something against every conception of mental—decency let us say. I think I know your dates and figures pretty well by this time. You were born in '75. Now, in 1920, we'll say you're eighteen. It's taken you forty-five years to live to eighteen, and if you're to live to forty-five again it will have taken you—how long?—seventy-two years. It will then be getting on for 1950. Jennie was born in 1903. You're now forty-five to her seventeen. If this thing comes off you'll be in the early forties together. But at the same time you'll be over seventy. Look at it, Derry—look at it."
"Look at it? I have looked at it. I'll look at it again if you like.... Now I've looked at it again. Only you and I know it. And anyway there's nothing in it."
"Julia Oliphant knows it."
"Then only you and I and Julia Oliphant know it, and there's nothing in it."