"I declare I think we have got hold of the right clue at last," cries Byng, his dimmed eyes emitting such a flash as would have seemed impossible to them five minutes ago. "Read in this light, it is not nearly so incomprehensible: 'I shall never marry you, I have no right to marry anyone.' Of course, I see now! What an ass I was not to see it at once! What she means is that she has no right to leave her mother! To anyone who knew her lofty sense of duty as well as I ought to have done it is quite obvious that that is what she means. Is not it quite obvious? is not it as clear as the sun in heaven?"
Jim shakes his head.
"I am afraid that it is rather a forced interpretation."
"I do not agree with you," rejoins the other hotly; "I see nothing forced about it. You do not know as well as I do—how should you?—her power of delicate, self-sacrificing devotion. It is overstrained, I grant you; but there it is—she thinks she has no right to leave her mother now that she is all alone."
"She is not alone; she has her husband."
"I mean now that all her other children are married and scattered. There are plenty more—are not there?—though I never could get her to talk about them."
"There are two sisters and two brothers."
"But they are no longer any good to their mother," persists Byng, clinging to his theory with all the greater tenacity as he sees that it meets with no very great acceptance in his friend's eyes; "as far as she is concerned they are non-existent."
"I do not know what right you have to say that."
"And so she, with her lofty idea of self-sacrifice, immolates her own happiness on the altar of her filial affection. It is just like her!"—going off into a sort of rapture—"blind mole that I was not to divine the motive, which her ineffable delicacy forbade her to put into words. She thought she had a right to think that I should have comprehended her without words!"