nonsense."

Fyne gave me the impression of having escaped from a man inspired by a
grimly playful ebullition of high spirits. It must have been most
distasteful to him; and his solemnity got damaged somehow in the
process, I perceived. There were holes in it through which I could see
a new, an unknown Fyne.

"You wouldn't believe it," he went on, "but she looks upon her father
exclusively as a victim. I don't know," he burst out suddenly through
an enormous rent in his solemnity, "if she thinks him absolutely a
saint, but she certainly imagines him to be a martyr."

It is one of the advantages of that magnificent invention, the prison,
that you may forget people whom are put there as though they were dead.
One needn't worry about them. Nothing can happen to them that you can
help. They can do nothing which might possibly matter to anybody. They
come out of it, though, but that seems hardly an advantage to themselves
or anyone else. I had completely forgotten the financier de Barral.
The girl for me was an orphan, but now I perceived suddenly the force of
Fyne's qualifying statement, "to a certain extent." It would have been
infinitely more kind all round for the law to have shot, beheaded,
strangled, or otherwise destroyed this absurd de Barral, who was a
danger to a moral world inhabited by a credulous multitude not fit to
take care of itself. But I observed to Fyne that, however insane was
the view she held, one could not declare the girl mad on that account.

"So she thinks of her father--does she? I suppose she would appear to
us saner if she thought only of herself."

"I am positive," Fyne said earnestly, "that she went and made desperate
eyes at Anthony..."

"Oh come!" I interrupted. "You haven't seen her make eyes. You don't
know the colour of her eyes."

"Very well! It don't matter. But it could hardly have come to that if
she hadn't... It's all one, though. I tell you she has led him on, or
accepted him, if you like, simply because she was thinking of her
father. She doesn't care a bit about Anthony, I believe. She cares for
no one. Never cared for anyone. Ask Zoe. For myself I don't blame
her," added Fyne, giving me another view of unsuspected things through
the rags and tatters of his damaged solemnity. "No! by heavens, I don't
blame her--the poor devil."

I agreed with him silently. I suppose affections are, in a sense, to be
learned. If there exists a native spark of love