I bowed a sort of assent to this. He really had me there.
“Besides, Eckhart,” he added, “while you have a perfect right to call me a fool, you certainly can't say that, as life runs, my attitude has been unnatural. The woman deliberately broke with life. As a result of her own acts, she is now outside the pale of decent society.”
“Outside—where we men are,” said I, very sad and bitter.
He sniffed, rather contemptuously. He thought my observation too obvious.
I added, as I turned toward the door—
“And at that, after your own tribute to the essential fineness of her character, your notion of 'decent society' sounds highly technical to me, Sir Robert. Good-by to you. You will forgive me for saying that I shall be very glad when you are gone.”
He did not reply. But as I laid my hand on the knob of the door, I caught a low exclamation behind me that seemed to have both pain and surprise in it.
I looked back. He had sunk down in his chair. One side of his face, the left side, had twitched upward so that there was a distinct slant to his mouth and an observably deep, curving line extending from the left lower corner of his nose.
“Are you ill?” I asked, after a moment.
He slowly shook his head. “Something snapped, I thought,” he replied, rather huskily. “But I am all here, evidently.”