"'You're splendid, Iris' he said, still laughing. 'You would change a respectable swindler into such an awful criminal that no police in this world would dare try to arrest him.' And then he came very humbly to me, and said that until a few weeks ago he had not dreamt I had a heart, but now he had found even more, that it was a flag of loyalty. But he added suddenly: "'I must tell Antony that, to make him realise what he has made me lose.' He seemed so queerly to bring his mind back to Antony, for all his 'not mattering' any more. And I showed my impatience, begging him to forget the wretched man. "'I do,' he said, 'but he comes back every now and then. You see, the fool was so obsessed about me that he quite forgot what part you had in my life. And so he has hurt me much more than he ever dreamed he could hurt me. I must make him understand that....' "Curiously enough, or not, I hadn't now any wild passion of resentment against Antony. Roger's way of explaining him seemed to have coloured my view of him; something of that 'inevitability' I suppose, somehow made me think of him more as an evil circumstance than as an evil man. But I did not want to see him that night, in fact my head was aching so that I was fit only for bed; and when I asked Roger if he intended to let him stay on, he shrugged his shoulders and said: "'We will be leaving him behind us soon enough.' "I suppose it's true that no one is ever made to suffer more than he or she can bear--but self-pity is a goading kind of master, isn't it? And those long evening hours in my bedroom that night were terrible, fighting with a splitting head and heart, and being so beaten and bruised by both that I began to feel mean and whipped, like an offender punished for some offence. But, my God, what and against whom!... Until, after a long century, I heard Roger enter his room. And I crept in after him.... "I made a fuss on the telephone about your having to come to see me the next afternoon, you remember? I insisted that you must, whether you had work to do or not, for I couldn't bear to face that long empty afternoon alone until Roger came back from the City.