"You're always right, my dear," said I.
That is practically all, up to the present, that I have to tell you about Jaffery. What words passed between him and Liosha in the drawing-room I have never known. Jaffery, with conscience still sore, and childishly anxious that I should not account him a traitor and a scoundrel, and a brute too despicable for human touch, told me, as I have already stated, over and over again, until I yawned for weariness in the small hours of the morning, what had taken place in his staggering interview with Doria; but as regards Liosha, he was shyly evasive. After all, I fancy, it was a very simple affair. She had told me bluntly that when the two men, Jaffery and Prescott, rode into the scene of Balkan desolation in which she was the central figure, Jaffery was the one who caused her heart to throb. And in her chaste, proud way she had loved him ever since that extraordinary moment. And though Jaffery has never confessed it, I am absolutely certain that, just as Monsieur Jourdain spoke prose, sans le savoir, so, without knowing it, was Jaffery in love with Liosha when she drove away from Northlands in Mr. Ras Fendihook's car. Perhaps before. Quien sabe? But he imagined himself to be in love with a moonbeam. And the moonbeam shot like a glamorous, enchanted sword between him and Liosha, and kept them apart until the moment of dazed revelation, when he saw that the moonbeam was merely a pale, earnest, anxious, suffering little human thing, alien to his every instinct, a firmament away, in every vital essential, from the goddess of his idolatry.
That is how I explain—and I have puzzled my head into aching over any other possible explanation—the attitude of Jaffery towards Liosha on the Vesta voyage. Well, my conjectures are of not much value. I have done my best to put the facts, as I know them, before you; and if you are interested in the matter you can go on conjecturing to your heart's content. "Look here, my friend," said I, as soon as I could attune my mind to new conditions, "what about your new novel?"
He frowned portentously. "It can go to blazes!" "Aren't you going to finish it?"
"No."
"But you must. Don't you realise that you're a born novelist?"
"Don't you realise," he growled, "that you're a born fool?"