"Isn't there?" said I. "You just ask the next cannibal you meet. He is confronted with the Great Conundrum, even as we are."
"He can solve it by clubbing his wife on the head."
"Quite so," said I. "But do you think the poor fellow does it for pleasure? No. It worries him dreadfully to have to do it."
"That's specious rot, and platitudinous rubbish such as any soft idiot who's been glued all his life to an armchair can reel off by the mile. I know better. A couple of years ago Liosha would have eaten out of my hand, to say nothing of dining with me at the Canton. It's all this infernal civilisation. It has spoiled her."
"You began this argument," said I, "with the proposition that woman was a remarkable phenomenon—a generalisation which includes woman in fig-leaves and woman in diamonds."
"Oh, dry up," said Jaffery, "and tell me what I ought to do. I didn't want to hurt the girl's feelings. Why should I? In fact I'm rather fond of her. She appeals to me as something big and primitive. Long ago, if it hadn't been that poor old Prescott—you know what I mean—I gave up thinking of her in that way at once—and now I just want to be friends—we have been friends. She's a jolly good sort, and, if I had thought of it, I would have taken her about a bit. . . . But what I can't stand is these modern neurotics—"
"You called them heroics—"
"All the same thing. It's purely artificial. It's cultivated by every modern woman. Instead of thinking in a straight line they're taught it's correct to think in a corkscrew. You never know where to have 'em."
"That's their artfulness," said I. "Who can blame them?"
Meanwhile Liosha, pursued by Barbara, had rushed to her bedroom, where she burst into a passion of tears. Jaff Chayne, she wailed, had always treated her like dirt. It was true that her father had stuck pigs in the stockyards; but he was of an old Albanian family, quite as good a family as Jaff Chayne's. It had numbered princes and great chieftains, the majority of whom had been most gloriously slain in warfare. She would like to know which of Jaff Chayne's ancestors had died out of their feather beds.