"Very well," said Tony.
She walked quickly upstairs, went into her room, and sat down on the bed. A square of moonlight lay on the floor, and the moving shadows curtsied across it. They and the pines outside seemed to be nodding to her grotesquely under the moon—they seemed to be mocking her for her great illusion lost.
"Furlonger...." she repeated to herself. "Furlonger...."
A sick quake of rage was in her heart. Her feelings were still confused, but definite grievances stood out of the jumble. This man whom she had thought so much of—in school-girl language "had a rave on"—had deceived her, told her lies, acted them, and won by them ... well, the horrible thing was that she did not really know how much or how little he had won.
But worse still was the realisation that he had made her do unconsciously something she thought wrong. Like most girls of her age she had a cast-iron code of morals. When a school-girl sets out to be moral, there is no professor of ethics or minister of religion that can touch her—her morality has behind it all the enormous force of inexperience, it can neither stretch nor bend, and it breaks only at the risk of her whole spiritual life.
She was horrified to think she had given her friendship to a scoundrel, even though she had done it ignorantly. It was like befriending a girl who cheated or told tales. For her his crime had no attraction or interest—it was just a hideous blot and defilement. She had often heard the Wickham Rubber scandal discussed, and now store-housed memories came to appal her. Hundreds of people, most of them already poor, had been ruined and plunged into misery—widows with growing families, elderly spinsters with hard-gathered savings, poor old men with the terror of the workhouse closing on them with age, had trusted this Furlonger once and execrated him now. He was like that dreadful man in the Psalms, who laid wait to murder the innocent—"he doth ravish the poor when he getteth him into his den." And she had allowed this man to be her friend, she had confided her secrets to him, she had dreamed of him and prayed to meet him.... Tony's teeth and hands clenched, and her eyes grew miserable and hard.
Then she began to wonder what had made Furlonger want her friendship. What had he and she in common? Somehow she could not for a moment believe that he had sought her out from unworthy motives. The fact would always remain that he had wanted her friendship, that he had not given her a word which was not kind or courteous, that he had come to her rescue in her hour of need ... the tears rushed to her eyes; that was the bitterest part of all—her memories of his kindliness and knight-errantry—pictures of East Grinstead, Swites Wood, Brambletye, Lingfield Park, and that little old cottage by Goatsluck Farm. Suddenly she found herself making up her mind not to join her father and mother in condemning him. She would take his part in the scene which she knew was at hand.
She soon heard her father calling her, and went down. He pointed into her mother's boudoir, a small room with French windows opening on the lawn. It was full of vague furniture and vague mixed colours, and it seemed to Tony as if she were swimming through it up to the couch where her mother lay. It never struck her as strange that her father should seem unable to deal with her himself, but should hand her over to this weak invalid, who lay with closed eyes in the lamplight.
"Now, I don't want a scene," she said, without opening them.
"Tony won't make a scene," said Sir Gambier; "she's a deep one."