“Because I’ve always sworn I’d give Laura all the rope she wanted,” said Clowes between his teeth.  “If she wants to hang herself, let her.  I should score in the long run.  Hyde would chuck her away like an old shoe when he got sick of her.”  There was a fire not far from madness burning now in the wide, dilated eyes.  “Afterwards she’d have to come back, because those Selincourts haven’t got twopence between the lot of them, and if she did she’d be mine for good and all.  Hyde would break her in for me.”

“You don’t realize what you’re saying, Berns, old man.  You can’t,” said Val gently, “or you wouldn’t say it.  It is too unutterably beastly.”

“Ah! perhaps the point of view is a bit warped,” Bernard returned carelessly to sanity.  “It shocks you, does it?  But the fact is Laura has the whip hand of me and I can’t forgive her for it.  She’s the saint and I’m the sinner.  She’s a bit too good.  If Hyde broke her in and sent her home on her knees, I should have the whip hand of her, and I’d like to reverse the positions.  Can you follow that?  Yes!  A bit warped, I own.  But I am warped—­ bound to be.  Give the body such a wrench as the Saxons gave mine and you’re bound to get some corresponding wrench in the mind.”

“That’s rank materialism.”

“Bosh! it’s common sense.  Look at your own case!  Do you never analyze your own behaviour?  You would if you lay on your back year in year out like me.  You’re maimed too.”

“No, am I?” Val reached for a fourth cushion.  “Think o’ that, now.”

“Or you wouldn’t be content to hang on in Chilmark, riding over another man’s property and squiring another man’s wife.  The shot that broke your arm broke your life.  You had the makings of a fine soldier in you, but you were knocked out of your profession and you don’t care for any other.  With all your ability you’ll never be worth more than six or seven hundred a year, for you’ve no initiative and you’re as nervous as a cat.  You’re not married and you’ll never marry:  you’re too passive, too continent, too much of a monk to attract a healthy woman.  No:  don’t you flatter yourself that you’ve escaped any more than I have.  The only difference is that the Saxons mucked up my life and you’ve mucked up your own.  You fool! you high-minded, over-scrupulous fool! . . .  You and I are wreckage of war, Val:  cursed, senseless devilry of war.—­ Go and play a tune, I’m sick of talking.”

Val was not any less sick of listening.  He went to the piano, but not to play a tune.  Impossible to insult that crippled tempest on the sofa with the sweet eternal placidities of Mozart or Bach.  His fingers wandered over the lower register, improvising, modulating from one minor key to another in a cobweb of silver harmony spun pale and low from a minimum of technical attention.  For once Bernard had struck home.  “The shot that broke your arm broke your life.”  Stripped of Bernard’s rhetoric, was it true?