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That question too, at the queer touch of association, played up for Mark even under so much proof that the state of his own soul was being with the lapse of every instant registered. Phil Bloodgood had brought about the state of his soul–there was accordingly that amount of connection; only it became further remarkable that from the moment his companion had sounded him, and sounded him, he knew, down to the last truth of things, his disposition, his necessity to talk, the desire that had in the morning broken the spell of his confinement, the impulse that had thrown him so defeatedly into Mrs. Folliott’s arms and into Florence Ash’s, these forces seemed to feel their impatience ebb and their discretion suddenly grow. His companion was talking again, but just then, incongruously, made his need to communicate lose itself. It was as if his personal case had already been touched by some tender hand–and that, after all, was the modest limit of its greed. “I know now why you came back–did Lottie mention how I had wondered? But sit down, sit down–only let me, nervous beast as I am, take it standing!–and believe me when I tell you that I’ve now ceased to wonder. My dear chap, I have it! It can’t but have been for poor Phil Blood-good. He sticks out of you, the brute–as how, with what he has done to you, shouldn’t he? There was a man to see me yesterday–Tim Slater, whom I don’t think you know, but who’s ‘on’ everything within about two minutes of its happening (I never saw such a fellow!) and who confirmed my supposition, all my own, however, mind you, at first, that you’re one of the sufferers. So how the devil can you not feel knocked? Why should you look as if you were having the time of your life? What a hog to have played it on you, on you, of all his friends!” So Newton Winch continued, and so the air between the two men might have been, for a momentary watcher–which is indeed what I can but invite the reader to become–that of a nervously displayed, but all considerate, as well as most acute, curiosity on the one side, and that on the other, after a little, of an eventually fascinated acceptance of so much free and in especial of so much right attention. “Do you mind my asking you? Because if you do I won’t press; but as a man whose own responsibilities, some of ’em at least, don’t differ much, I gather, from some of his, one would like to know how he was ever allowed to get to the point–! But I do plough you up?”

Mark sat back in his chair, moved but holding himself, his elbows squared on each arm, his hands a bit convulsively interlocked across him–very much in fact as he had appeared an hour ago in the old tapestry bergere; but as his rigour was all then that of the grinding effort to profess and to give, so it was considerably now for the fear of too hysterically gushing. Somehow too–since his wound was to that extent open–he winced at hearing the author of it branded. He hadn’t so much minded the epithets Mrs. Folliott had applied, for they were to the appropriator of her securities. As the appropriator of his own he didn’t so much want to brand him as–just more “amusingly” even, if one would.–to make out, perhaps, with intelligent help, how such a man, in such a relation, could come to tread such a path: which was exactly the interesting light that Winch’s curiosity and sympathy were there to assist him to. He pleaded at any rate immediately his advertising no grievance. “I feel sore, I admit, and it’s a horrid sort of thing to have had happen; but when you call him a brute and a hog I rather squirm, for brutes and hogs never live, I guess, in the sort of hell in which he now must be.”