But, the devil, all these men! Yet there she was ... profoundly _un_different, profoundly as though untouched by any more soiling breath than that of the lightest passage of the years. It was, you might hear Hilary thinking, confoundedly unfair to all decent womanhood, Iris’s immunity in the abyss. He should not like her--no, there should not be left anything about her for a decent man to like. The friend of Iris’s childhood couldn’t help a savage anger with her for retaining the interest of a clean, and otherwise balanced, mind. The friend of childhood liked the woman so deeply that, being a man of principle, he could see only her worst side. And then the man of principle would fall into the toils of the friend of childhood, and whilst the two antagonists were wrestling together they could see only the side of the woman that it made them the most wretched to see. The very fact that Hilary was deeply attached to Iris made him see only her worst side. Many good men call that “liking” a woman. Many good women call that “idealism” in men. IV It is curious how many irrelevant details will crowd back into the mind when one is trying to reconstruct only the main passage of an evening, which was throughout, now one looks back on it, as though directed to its inevitable end. I remember how, through one of the long silences common to our odd, antagonistic intimacy, I sat staring into my brandy-glass--those Gargantuan ones, Hilary had--and wondering at Hilary’s, well, unsentimental sentimentality; and then I wondered what sort of a fight the man of principle would put up against the friend of childhood should Iris ever show the faintest inclination to take as her third husband Mr. Townshend of Magralt. The man of principle would lose ... happily lose or unhappily, you could not tell, for no man can tell what odd happinesses, more secretly kept than crimes, another man will snatch from intimacy with a woman whom he would detest if he did not desire. But through the silences of that evening there walked mainly the figure of the legend of Boy Fenwick, a boyish figure midst a babble of confused rumours and knowing silences. Yet I was so concerned not to appear, to that watchful and dangerous friend of childhood, too interested in Mrs. Storm, that the name of Boy Fenwick hung on my lips before I was out with it. Oh, that name of Boy Fenwick! One knew it so well and so dimly, it would so often be just dropped into a conversation by some friend of his or some friend of a friend, just the name with a passing regret, to the perpetuation of his charm and his time....