hough the
situation struck him as bizarre, but he did not believe that Val
was at ease, no, not for all his natural manner and fertility in
commonplace. Lawrence was faintly sorry for the poor devil, but
only faintly: after all, an awkward interview once in ten years
was a low price to pay for that night which Lawrence never had
forgotten and never would forget. He had an excellent memory,
photographic and phonographic, a gift that wise men covet for
themselves but deprecate in their friends.

Lawrence was no Pharisee, but he was not a Samaritan either. He
had deliberately set himself to pull up any stray weeds of moral
scruple that lingered in a mind stripped bare of Christian ethic,
a task harder than some realize, since thousands of men who have
no faith in Christ practise virtues that were not known for
virtues by the Western world before Christ came to it. But every
man is his own special pleader, and Lawrence, whose theory was
that one man is as good as another, retained a good hearty
prejudice against certain forms of moral failure, and excused it
on the ground that it was rather a taste than a principle. He
looked directly into Stafford's eyes as the red glow of the cigar
flamed and faded between the two heads so close together, and in
his own eyes there was the same point of smiling ironic cruelty
that Isabel had read in them--the same as Stafford himself had
read in them not so many years ago. But apparently Stafford read
nothing in them now.

"Sit down, won't you? you've had a fagging day." Lawrence
indicated the chairs left on the lawn. "Hear me beginning to
play the host! As a matter of fact, you must know your way about
the place far better than I do. Although we're cousins, Bernard
and I have seen next to nothing of each other since we were boys
at school. You, Val, must know him better than any one except
his wife. I want you to tell me about him. I'm in dangerous
country and I need a map."

"I should be inclined to vary the metaphor a little and call him
an uncharted sea," Val smiled as he threw one leg over the other
and settled himself among his cushions. He was dead tired,
having been up since six in the morning and on his feet or in
the saddle all day. "But I'm at your service, subject always to
the proviso that I'm Bernard's agent, which makes my position
rather delicate. What is it you want to know?"

Since it was whether Clowes behaved decently to his wife,
Lawrence shifted