“Eileen has gone with him,” Arnold added, in graver vein than usual. “I suppose she wants to look after him, and they both want not to waste the time that’s left.... Of course, many people will be horrified, and think the worst. Personally, I think it a pity she should do it, because it means, for her, giving up a great deal, now and afterwards, though for him nothing now but a principle. The breaking of the principle is surprising in him, and really, if one comes to think of it, pretty sad, and a sign of how he’s broken up altogether. Because he has always held these things uncivilised and wrong, and said so. I suppose he’s too weak in body to say so any more, or to stand against his need and hers any longer. I think it a bad mistake, and I wish they wouldn’t do it. Besides, she’s too fine, and has too much to give, to throw it all at one dying man, as she’s doing. What’s it been in Datcherd all along that’s so held her--he so sickly and wrecked and morose, she so brilliant and alive and young and full of genius and joy? Of course he’s brilliant too, in his own way, and lovable, and interesting; but a failure for all that, and an unhappy failure, and now at the last a failure even as to his own principles of life. I suppose it has been always just that that has held her; his failure and need. These things are dark; but anyhow there it is; one never saw two people care for each other more or need each other more.... She was afraid of hurting his work by coming to him before; but the time for thinking of that is past, and I suppose she will stay with him now till the end, and it will be their one happy time. You know I think these things mostly a mistake, and these absorbing emotions uncivilised, and nearly all alliances ill-assorted, and this one will be condemned. But much she’ll care for that when it is all over and he has gone. What will happen to her then I can’t guess; she won’t care much for anything any of us can do to help, for a long time. It is a pity. But such is life, a series of futile wreckages.” He went on to other topics. Eddy didn’t read the rest just then, but went out for a long and violent walk across country with his incredibly mongrel dog. Confusion, with its many faces, its shouting of innumerable voices, overlay the green June country. For him in that hour the voice of pity and love rose dominant, drowning the other voices, that questioned and wondered and denied, as the cuckoos from every tree questioned and commented on life in their strange, late note. Love and pity; pity and love; mightn’t these two resolve all discord at last? Arnold’s point of view, that of the civilised person of sense, he saw and shared; Eileen’s and Datcherd’s he saw and felt; his own mother’s, and the Bellairs’, and that of those like-minded with them, he saw and appreciated; all were surely right, yet they did not make for harmony.