Mrs. Boy Fenwick had seemed to feel most deeply her responsibility to Boy’s memory and to his friends’ love for him. She simply had, it seemed, to safeguard the love they had for him, by making it clear that he had died as he had lived. In disenchantment of an ideal--that, if Boy was to commit suicide at all, could be his only possible justification. His suicide, as apart from his death, naturally scarred his friends, but not so deeply when they knew that it was done in the despair of the disenchantment of an ideal. Boy’s friends would understand that completely, Iris must have felt, for were they not Boy’s friends? He was sensitive even to madness--they could, indeed they’d have to, think that. But that he was given something to rouse his sensitiveness and to overturn his balance--she had, Iris seemed to have felt, to tell his friends that, so that, in giving Iris all the blame that was her due, they should retain their memory of a Boy strong to the end in idealism. And they seemed, I gathered from Hilary, to have done that without stint. Hilary, too--for wasn’t he a realist, that man? One could see them all at it, Boy’s friends to Boy’s widow--the dead adored youth in their minds, the still, pale, beautiful girl between them. She had to tell Gerald. You can imagine that.... She had, Hilary said, a quite unearthly beauty just at that time, and was so still, so terribly _un_young somewhere inside her. “It was my fault,” she had said. She had been looking when he had thrown himself out of the window. He had just lit a cigarette, she said. “That a girl of that age,” said Hilary, “that a girl whose moral character, you can’t help seeing, was ... well, what it was, should be so impelled to tell the truth at her own expense, at the expense of her own ruin, at the expense of a queer brother’s hatred, for that must have hurt her most of all, by a sense of honour that would make even the rigidity of a Guy look small, well----” “But isn’t that where, Hilary, there comes in that ‘caste’ which you complain of her having always ignored?” But Hilary wasn’t going back on any of his words. A “hm,” and he was off, saying that it made him think there was something in the stale paradox that you never know the best about a woman until you know the worst. “But, God in Heaven, what a worst!” She had wanted, Hilary tried to explain--pathetically, you can see, trying to make clear to himself the noble as well as the shady side of Iris--to keep permanent, even to reinforce, the love for Boy of Boy’s friends by the idea that he had died untamed of his ideal. You could see her, Hilary said, meeting Gerald half-way on that. “Boy died,” she had said, “for purity.” “Hilary! She said that!” And that, you know, was all that she had said! Boy Fenwick had died “for purity.” That was all. “It seems,” I couldn’t help thinking aloud, “very sweeping....” It was, Hilary said grimly--and very pointed, in a girl not twenty! “But!” I murmured.