“What I asked for,” John said, “was an explanation.  What you have offered is altogether inadequate—­if it can be called an explanation at all.”  He wrenched his eyes away from March’s face.  “I’ve liked you,” he went on, “I’ve liked you despite the fact that I’ve had some excuse for entertaining a contradictory feeling.  And I concede your extraordinary talents.  But it remains true that you’re not—­the sort of man I’d expect my daughter to marry.  Nor, unless I could see some better reason than I see now, permit her to marry.”

This was further than, in cool blood, he’d have gone.  But the finding of a stranger here in his own place (any man would have been a stranger when it came as close as this to Mary) professing to understand her needs, to see with the clear eye of certainty where her happiness lay, angered and outraged him.  The more for an irresistible conviction that the profession was true.  But that word permit went too far.  He wasn’t enough of an old-fashioned parent to believe, at all whole-heartedly, that Mary was his to dispose of.

Again, he looked up at the man’s face, braced for the retort his challenge had laid him open to, and once more the expression he saw there—­a thing as momentary as a shimmer of summer lightning,—­told him more than anything within the resources of rhetoric could have effected.  It was something a little less than a smile that flashed across March’s face, a look half pitiful, half ironic.  It told John Wollaston that his permission was not needed.  Events had got beyond him.  He was superseded.

He dropped back limp in his chair.  March seated himself, too, and leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, his hands clasped.

“I know how it must look to you, sir,” he said gravely.  “Even the social aspect of the thing in the narrowest sense of the word is serious.  And there are other difficulties harder to get over than that.  I don’t think I minimize any of them.  And I don’t believe that Mary does.  But the main thing is a fact that can’t be escaped.  If we face that first ...”

He broke off there for a moment and John saw him grip his hands together.  It was with a visible effort that he went on.

“One of the things Mary said last night was that sentimentality was the crudest thing in the world.  It caused more tragedies, she said, than malice.  She had learned the cruelty of it by experience.  It’s not an experience she can safely go through again.”

It was in an automatic effort to defend himself against the conviction he felt closing down upon him that John lashed out here with a reply.

“The fact you’re asking me to face is, I suppose, that you two have discovered you’re in love with each other to a degree that makes all other considerations negligible.”

“That’s not quite it,” March replied patiently.  “A part of it is, that it would have been just as impossible for Mary to marry Graham Stannard if she had never seen me.  And if she could forget me completely it would still be impossible for her to marry any one else like him.”