Suddenly Soames said: "I can't go on like this. I tell you, I can't
go on like this." His eyes were shifting from side to side, like an
animal's when it looks for way of escape. 'He really suffers,' thought
Jolyon; 'I've no business to forget that, just because I don't like
him.'
"Surely," he said gently, "it lies with yourself. A man can always put
these things through if he'll take it on himself."
Soames turned square to him, with a sound which seemed to come from
somewhere very deep.
"Why should I suffer more than I've suffered already? Why should I?"
Jolyon could only shrug his shoulders. His reason agreed, his instinct
rebelled; he could not have said why.
"Your father," went on Soames, "took an interest in her--why, goodness
knows! And I suppose you do too?" he gave Jolyon a sharp look. "It seems
to me that one only has to do another person a wrong to get all the
sympathy. I don't know in what way I was to blame--I've never known.
I always treated her well. I gave her everything she could wish for. I
wanted her."
Again Jolyon's reason nodded; again his instinct shook its head. 'What
is it?' he thought; 'there must be something wrong in me. Yet if there
is, I'd rather be wrong than right.'
"After all," said Soames with a sort of glum fierceness, "she was my
wife."
In a flash the thought went through his listener: 'There it is!
Ownerships! Well, we all own things. But--human beings! Pah!'
"You have to look at facts," he said drily, "or rather the want of
them."
Soames gave him another quick suspicious look.
"The want of them?" he said. "Yes, but I am not so sure."
"I beg your pardon," replied Jolyon; "I've told you what she said. It
was explicit."
"My experience has not been one to promote blind confidence in her word.
We shall see."
Jolyon got up.
"Good-bye," he said curtly.
"Good-bye," returned Soames; and Jolyon went out trying to understand
the look, half-startled, half-menacing, on his cousin's face. He sought
Waterloo Station in a disturbed frame of mind, as though the skin of
his moral being had been scraped; and all the way down in the train he
thought of Irene in her lonely flat, and of Soames in his lonely
office, and of the strange paralysis of life that lay on them both.
'In chancery!' he thought. 'Both their necks in chancery--and her's so
pretty!'