"Nonsense, my lad. Port won' make you drunk. Dam' good port, isn' it? ... Wouldn' make you drunk, though.... Don' talk dam' nonsense to me...." He was slightly drunk himself. III That interview with his father had a disturbing effect upon Speed. He had expected a row in which his father would endeavour to tyrannise over him, instead of which Sir Charles, if there had been any argument at all, had certainly got the better of it. In a sort of way it did seem rather unfair to have married without letting his parents know a word about it beforehand. But, of course, there had been good reasons. First, the housemastership. He couldn't have been given Lavery's unless he had married. Ervine had stressed very strongly the desirability of married housemasters. And it had therefore been necessary to do everything rather hurriedly in order to be able to begin at Lavery's in the September. It was when he reflected that, but for his father's intervention, he would probably never have been offered Lavery's that he felt the keenest feeling of unrest. The more he thought about it the more manifestly certain incidents in the past became explainable to him. The hostility of the Common-Room for instance. Did they guess the sort of "wire-pulling" that had been going on? Probably they did not know anything definitely, but wasn't it likely that they would conclude that such a startling appointment must have been the result of some ulterior intrigue? And wasn't it natural that they should be jealous of him? He hated Ervine because, behind all the man's kindness to him, he saw now merely the ignoble desire to placate influence. Ervine had done it all to please his father. It was galling to think that that adulatory speech on the Prize-Day, which had given him such real and genuine pleasure, had been dictated merely by a willingness to serve the whim of an important man. It was galling to think that Lord Portway's smiles and words of commendation had been similarly motivated. It was galling to think that, however reticent he was about being the son of Sir Charles Speed, the relationship seemed fated to project itself into his career in the most unfortunate and detestable of ways. Then he thought of Helen. Her motives, of all, were pure and untainted; she shared neither her father's sycophancy nor his own father's unscrupulousness. She had married him for no other reason than that she loved him. And in the midst of the haze of indecent revelations that seemed to be enveloping him, her love for him and his for her brightened like stars when the night deepens.