‘Yes, but that’s just it—that horrible word “kindness”! If ever there were two utterly self-absorbed people, without a trace, with an absolute horror of kindness, it is just my brother and I. It’s most of it false and most of it useless. We all surely must take what comes in this topsy-turvy world. I believe in saying out:—that the more one thinks about life the worse it becomes. There are only two kinds of happiness in this world—a wooden post’s and Prometheus’s. And who ever heard of any one having the impudence to be kind to Prometheus? As for a miserable “medium” like me, not quite a post and leagues and leagues from even envying a Prometheus, she’s better for the powder without the jam. But that’s all nothing. What I can’t help thinking—and it’s not a bit giving my brother away, because we both think it—that it was partly our thoughtlessness that added at least something to—to the rest. It was perfectly absurd. He saw you were ill; he saw—he must have seen even in that first Sunday talk—that your nerves were all askew. And who doesn’t know what “nerves” means nowadays? And yet he deliberately chattered. He loves it—just at large, you know, like me. I told him before I came out that I intended, if I could, to say all this. And now it’s said you’ll please forgive me for going back to it.’ ‘Please don’t talk about forgiveness. But when you say he chattered, you mean about Sabathier, of course. And that, you know, I don’t care a fig for now. We can settle all that between ourselves—him and me, I mean. And now tell me candidly again—Is there any “prey” in my face now?’ She looked up fleetingly into his eyes, leant back her head and laughed. ‘“Prey,” there never was a glimpse.’ ‘And “change”?’ Their eyes met again in an infinitely brief, infinitely bewildering argument. ‘Really, really, scarcely perceptible,’ she assured him, ‘except, of course, how horribly, horribly ill you look. And that only seems to prove to me you must be hiding something else. No illusion on earth could—could have done that to your face.’