"My dear, you are getting very difficult!" she protested. "And you weren't very nice to poor Antony last night, maybe, for he said he had found you a trifle suspicious." "I suspicious! Why, the man's full of it, he throws the stuff about like ink--he's suspicious even of me, the only friend he's got!" "You had better glower at him not at me, Ronnie. And anyway, he's quite changed now, you will soon not be able to see him for tea-parties and the like! There's two lots of people in the world, he said, those who take tea and those who don't; you can either have your headache from boredom or from drink--and Antony is now going to try the first kind." And as I stared rather satirically at her, Iris suddenly sat up in her chair and became very serious. "It's quite true, Ronnie--and if you're the man you've led me to believe you are, you will take a hand and help. The poor man realises he has made a horrible mess of his life, and he realises that it hasn't been worth it. He's tired of wandering, and he's tired of being an outsider...." "You don't mean to tell me he said that!" "Not in those very words," she admitted, "but he was very sweet and pathetic, and I think he might be given a chance...." "A chance at what?" I asked bluntly. "Well, whatever it is men are given a chance about. Don't, please, be thick-headed, Ronnie. I suppose he wants to get back." "What, into the divorce court again!" Iris jumped up from her chair, and there was no smile on the face she turned to me. "I think you are being horrible about him, perfectly beastly. And you say you are a friend of his!..." "Iris, for the Lord's sake don't let us get dramatic about Antony--and we can't do it half so well as he can, anyway." And as she turned away with that little grimace of contempt that she reserved for peculiarly tiresome people, I got up from my chair the better to defend myself. And I was getting very hot and bothered about the whole thing, too. "Don't you see that it's exactly because I'm a friend of his and know him pretty well that I know all this 'getting back' talk is simply stuff?" I put to her. "My dear, I've been 'sympathetic' about Antony for years, but it's never done him or myself any good--simply because there's never one circumstance in life when he will give up his vanities and bravadoes, he's so full of silly contempt that he will never even compromise. It's not possible to help a man who won't help himself...." "The one after that in my copy-book was 'every cloud has a silver lining,'" Iris said dangerously.