To me, the way I see it, it looks as though certain things were decreed to happen and that, therefore, they did happen: they had it in their blood, these people, that certain things should happen to them, and I could no more contrive these things than they could evade them. But Hilary and Guy, murmuring together in that astonishing unison which can only be found in two Englishmen who disagree upon everything in the world but on the fact that conduct is three parts of life, are of opinion that my substitution of the word “ptomaine” for “septic” really affected the course of events. Had I, they say in effect, spoken the truth like a brave little man, there would have been a divorce and every one would by now have been happy, as happiness goes. And then, too, they have something to say about those two red lights, those two rear-lamps of two cars sweeping into South Audley Street--had I told Iris, they say, about Gerald, those two red lights never would have been so close together. Oh, Guy, what a man is that! That latter-day thunder-god of dandies, that warrior of conduct, that man of cold eyes who never could give “gratuitous information” about any one! Oh, Hilary, that friend of childhood! Hilary and Guy, friends of the late Barty March, had known Gerald and Iris since their earliest childhood. But Gerald had no sooner grown up than, at the impulse of his furious nature, he had turned away from his friends, his people: he had dropped out, had cut away; and no one, it’s not difficult to imagine, would want to intrude on that young man. But I was to find, after the coming of the lady of the green hat, that it wasn’t only at the impulse of his furious nature that Gerald had, well, withered fiercely into solitude. In very truth that Gerald had been a hero-worshipper; and in very truth he had become, as his sister had said, a nothing without his hero. Very few things had ever mattered to Gerald Haveleur March; but those few things, one was to learn, had mattered far too much. His sister was, as it’s not impossible to have gathered, what is called _declassée_--even for a March or a Portairley. And that was why I had heard nothing about her from Guy or Hilary, for while Guy never gave gratuitous information about any one, Hilary was held in thrall by that upside-down but virulent form of snobbery which will make of a man of property an extreme Liberal and a thorough-going die-hard disapprover of any one who let his, Hilary’s, caste down. Hilary, a sincerely good man, was an enemy of caste, he was an enemy of his own caste in particular, he did not believe in it; and yet, in the depths of that being where lurks a dragon that can ultimately defeat even the sincerity of a man of principle, Hilary believed in nothing else but caste.