I remembered that day.  It was on the downland, under the immense sky, amid the sound of larks.  She had explained the nature of things.  She had talked expressionlessly in pregnant words; she was talking now.  I knew no more of her to-day, after all these days, after I had given up to her my past and my future.

“You remember that day.  I was looking for such a man, and I found you.”

“And you ...”  I said, “you have done this thing!  Think of it!...  I have nobody—­nothing—­nowhere in the world.  I cannot look a man in the face, not even Churchill.  I can never go to him again.”  I paused, expecting a sign of softening.  None came.  “I have parted with my past and you tell me there is no future.”

“None,” she echoed.  Then, coldly, as a swan takes the water, she began to speak: 

“Well, yes!  I’ve hurt you.  You have suffered and in your pain you think me vile, but remember that for ages the virtue of to-morrow has been the vileness of to-day.  That which outstrips one, one calls vile.  My virtue lies in gaining my end.  Pity for you would have been a crime for me.  You have suffered.  And then?  What are you to me?  As I came among you I am to-day; that is where I am triumphant and virtuous.  I have succeeded.  When I came here I came into a world of—­of shadows of men.  What were their passions, their joys, their fears, their despair, their outcry, to me?  If I had ears, my virtue was to close them to the cries.  There was no other way.  There was one of us—­your friend Fox, I mean.  He came into the world, but had not the virtue to hold himself aloof.  He has told you, ‘One goes blind down here.’  He began to feel a little like the people round him.  He contracted likings and dislikings.  He liked you ... and you betrayed him.  So he went under.  He grew blind down here.  I have not grown blind.  I see as I saw.  I move as I did in a world of ... of the pictures of men.  They despair.  I hear groans ... well, they are the groans of the dead to me.  This to you, down near it, is a mass of tortuous intrigue; vile in its pettiest detail.  But come further off; stand beside me, and what does it look like?  It is a mighty engine of disintegration.  It has crushed out a whole fabric, a whole plane of society.  It has done that.  I guided it.  I had to have my eyes on every little strand of it; to be forever on the watch.”

“And now I stand alone.  Yesterday that fabric was everything to you; it seemed solid enough.  And where is it to-day?  What is it to you more than to me?  There stood Virtue ... and Probity ... and all the things that all those people stood for.  Well, to-day they are gone; the very belief in them is gone.  Who will believe in them, now that it is proved that their tools were people ... like de Mersch?  And it was I that did it.  That, too, is to be accounted to me for virtue.”