"I'd like to hear it first," I said.
"To see how much it inconveniences you." He laughed, and there was a bitterness in the smile on his thin lips that told forth his utter scorn of soul for the makeshift, worldly materialism for which I stood in his eyes. "It'll inconvenience us the devil of a lot, but that's what we're here for. We're supposed to have been educated. We've got to give a lead. The first duty of society is to make existence possible, the second is to make a decent thing of life. Gradually we're getting the first, but we're not in sight of the second." He looked out over the black, unmoving water and shook his head sadly. "We've got no social conscience, we've got no imagination to give us one. Look here, you'd think me a pretty fair swine if I took Sonia away for a week to an hotel, said good-bye at the end of it and packed her home?"
"It's not done," I admitted.
His clenched fist beat excitedly on the flat stone balustrade.
"Tom Dainton's got a flat in Chelsea and a woman living with him. Is that done?"
"I don't do it myself," I said. His information was not new to me: I had even met the girl, once when she was living with Tom, once with his predecessor.
"God in heaven! She's somebody's daughter, somebody's sister probably; there was a time when she was clean-minded ... and that brute-beast salves his conscience by telling himself that somebody else corrupted her before he came along! I told him exactly what I thought of him."
I had a fair idea of O'Rane's capacity for invective.
His lips curled till his teeth gleamed white in the moonlight.
"Do you still meet?" I inquired.