"And it's the question of an idiot." "An idiot-- ?" "Well, the idiot that I'VE been, in all sorts of ways--so often, of late, have I asked it.

You're excusable, since you ask it but now.

The answer, I saw to-day, has all the while been staring me in the face." "Then what in the world is it ?" "Why, the very intensity of her conscience about him--the very passion of her brave little piety.

That's the way it has worked," Mrs.Assingham explained "and I admit it to have been as 'rum' a way as possible.
But it has been working from a rum start.

From the moment the dear man married to ease his daughter off, and it then happened, by an extraordinary perversity, that the very opposite effect was produced--!" With the renewed vision of this fatality, however, she could give but a desperate shrug.
"I see," the Colonel sympathetically mused.