“Could I have known it would have hurt him--a few lectures?” Eddy protested against the unfairness of it, losing his temper a little. “You all talk as if Datcherd was the mistress of a girls’ school, who is expected to protect her pupils from the contamination of degrading influences and finds they have been reading Nietsche or _Tom Jones_.” It was a mistake to say that. He might have known it. Eileen flushed pink with a new rush of anger. “Is that so? Is that the way we speak of Hugh? I’ll tell him you said so. No, I wouldn’t trouble his ears with anything so paltry. I wonder do you know the way he speaks of you? He thinks you must be weak in the head, and he makes excuses for you, so he does; he never says an unkind word against you, only how you ought to be locked up and not let loose like ordinary people, and how he ought to have known you were like that and explained to you in so many words beforehand the principles he wanted maintained. As if he hadn’t been too ill to explain anything, and as if any baby wouldn’t have known, and as if any honourable person wouldn’t have taken particular care, just when he was ill and away, to run things just the way he would like. And after that you call him a girls’ school mistress....” “On the contrary,” said Eddy, crossly, “I said he wasn’t. You are horribly unfair. Is it any use continuing this conversation?” “It is not. Nor any other.” So, in her excitement, she got into a bus that was not going to Billy’s grandmother, and he swallowed his pride and told her so, but she would not swallow hers and listen to him, but climbed on to the top, and was carried down Piccadilly, and would have to change at Hyde Park Corner. Eileen was singularly poor at buses, Eddy reflected bitterly. He walked down to the Embankment, too crushed and unhappy to go home and risk meeting Arnold. He had been rude and ill-tempered to Eileen, and sneered at Datcherd to her, and she had been rude and ill-tempered to him, and would never forgive him, because it had been about Datcherd, her friend, loyalty to whom was the mainspring of her life. All her other friends might go by the board, if Datcherd but prospered. How much she cared, Eddy reflected, his anger fast fading into a pity and regret that hurt. For all her bitter words to him had that basis--a poignant caring for Datcherd, with his wrecked health, and his wrecked home, and his hopeless, unsatisfied love for her--a love which would never be satisfied, because he had principles which forbade it, and she had a love for him which would always preserve his principles and his life’s work intact. And they were growing to care so much--Eddy had seen that in Eileen’s face when first he met her at the Leicester Galleries--with such intensity, such absorbing flame, that it hurt and burnt.... Eddy did not want to watch it.