His father continued in his impartial tone. "You know how much of that rotten stuff is in our family. You remember the Sharps, and the Dingleys, and the Abraham Clarkes. You know your mother died from sheer exhaustion," the old man trembled, "and I have been spared for a fairly useless life by constant patching up. The war didn't knock me up only——"
"I will not believe it!" Jarvis Thornton uttered, in intense tones. His father sighed.
"And by some fortune you were spared; you have grown up strong and sound and equable. I led your interests to the line of work you have chosen, for a purpose——"
He paused again. "In order that sex, mere sex, might have no special unhealthy fascination for you; that you might meet these problems and treat them as judiciously as you would a matter of banking—without sentiment, without passion, without an ignorant, liquorish hallucination——"
The son raised his hand.
"And now it has come in a new way," he said, quietly, "through your pity and your generosity and your faith. But it has come."
What Jarvis Thornton replied was neither coherent nor weighty. He flung aside the idea of pity or generosity as absurd. He loved this woman for herself, because, because he loved her. His father smiled a sad, kind smile.
"The mother does not seem to have added much to the blood." He threw this out in order to get the subject back into more reasonable channels.
"No, she is a weak woman. But what of it? I don't marry the family. We shall leave them and build a new life, and break the curse." He smiled, slightly.
"Granting your beliefs that no harm would come to your children, that it is all chance about these matters," persisted the father, "still you cannot escape the family. You marry the conditions; they will remain with you. They, if nothing else, will ruin your life."