"I grew desperate for her," continued Quentin, in the new assured voice. "Oh, don't think I gave you up without a struggle!--I had a dreadful time. I suffered horribly. But what will not a man do for his soul? I felt that my soul was at stake. It's damned rot to talk of men turning away from salvation--no man can get a real chance of salvation and not grasp it at once. Oh, don't think it didn't cut me to the heart to treat you as I did! I felt a swine and a cad, but I saw that I was grasping my only chance of redemption--and yours too. I couldn't help it, I tell you--no man can. Oh, don't think that if I could have saved myself with you, I wouldn't have done it rather than.... Oh, my God!--but I couldn't." There are moments in a woman's life when she is simply staggered by the selfishness of the male, and yet to every woman there is something inevitable about it, so that it does not stir up her rage and contempt, as it would if she saw it in her own sex. Janey felt no anger with Quentin, she only thought how pitifully young he looked. There was a pause--a long pause, broken by the rustling of the wind in the garden. Janey's eyes were fixed on Quentin's face, her whole being seemed concentrated upon it, all her thoughts, all her passion, all her pity. Poor child! poor, poor boy! "Tony is very young," she said suddenly. "Yes, only seventeen." "And she's very good and gentle and well-bred." He nodded. "And she's never done anything really wrong." "No." There was another silence. This time it was Quentin who stared at Janey. He was still strong in the assurance Tony gave him; he was glad that they had begun to discuss her--he had not that feeling of being left alone with Janey, which at first had threatened to make the interview so terrible. At one time it had seemed almost as if the past had risen to swamp him--but now Tony had come to hold back the floods. The thought of her changed everything somehow, altered the old values, weakened what before had been invincible. Janey's face stood out from the shadows, washed in the indiscreet light of the afternoon, and for the first time he noticed a certain age and weariness about it. She was twenty-eight, nearly four years older than he, but he had never thought of her in relation to years and time. She had been to him an eternity of youth, her age was as irrelevant as the age of a play of Shakespeare or a symphony of Beethoven. But now he realised that she was twenty-eight--and looked it. There were hollows under her cheek-bones, where full, firm flesh should have been; there were tiny lines branching from the corners of her eyes, very faint, still undoubtedly there; and the autumnal colour on her cheeks did not lie as evenly as it might.