Hilary looked at me through his glass, for the rim reached his eyebrows as he sipped, in that way which is supposed, I believe, to make noisy Labour interruptors feel such fools as even a clown must despise. “But, Hilary,” I couldn’t help crying out, “you’re not implying that he threw himself out!” Hilary, because I had given way to a moment’s emphasis, gained instantly in leisured calm. “Hm,” he said. Gently he put down his huge glass. “Hm,” he said. He considered the stump of his cigar and decided that it was not worth while relighting it. “Hm,” he said, and took another from the box, pinching it. I passed him the matches. “Hm,” he said. But not I to be provoked! I did to him what Mr. Beerbohm once so notably did to the late Mr. James Pethick in the Casino at Dieppe: I plied the spur of silence. “Boy Fenwick,” said Hilary, lighting his cigar, “was a young man of quality. I don’t mean the word in the flashy sense in which you use it in your stories. But of _quality_--in mind and spirit. And yet,” in a volume of white smoke he smothered the failing light of the match, “he chucked himself out of that window.” And, you know, just at that moment I saw him doing that, and Iris lying in bed.... Hilary was angry. The very thought of that buried tragedy seemed to wrench that inside tap a little looser, but still the savage, hurt bewilderment would not quite reach his skin. “Of course,” I said, “they just said it was an accident, then....” “Naturally,” murmured Hilary. Naturally, Mrs. Boy Fenwick had not hurt her husband’s name by saying publicly that he had died of his own will. “And then,” said Hilary, “you come to the upside-down morality of an Iris March, the part of her that’s steel and iron and gold. She ruined herself, telling the truth.” “But,” I said humbly, “if you had preferred not to think of her as ruined, need you have believed that it was the truth?” “Iris,” said Hilary, “never lies. It bores her. One quite naturally gets into the habit of taking everything she says literally; for it always will be literally true, particularly if it’s against herself. She hasn’t, you see, a trace of the self-preservative instinct. Hm. Pity.” Iris Fenwick couldn’t, it seemed, endure for one moment the idea that his friends should think that Boy had fallen out in a moment of tipsy dizziness--Boy being well known to be a very light drinker, and Iris abominating drink, “the very idea of drink,” Hilary said, “as only the daughter of a drunkard and the sister of a drunkard can. If you ever get to know her at all well,” he suddenly smiled, “you may be a little put out, in the natural satisfaction of your thirst, by seeing Iris look just a little, well, sulky. Unreasonable, yes. But they get unreasonable about drink, daughters or sisters or wives of drunkards.”