Boyson, however, did not smile. He looked from one to the other.
"My sister and I introduced Daphne Floyd to Barnes," he said steadily, "and it is my country, as I hold,--or a portion of it--that allows these villainies. Some day we shall get a great reaction in the States, and then the reforms that plenty of us are clamouring for will come about. Meanwhile, as of course you know"--he addressed French--"New Yorkers and Bostonians suffer almost as much from the abomination that Nevada and South Dakota call laws, as Barnes has suffered. Marriage in the Eastern States is as sacred as with you--South Carolina allows no divorce at all--but with this licence at our gates, no one is safe, and thousands of our women, in particular--for the women bring two-thirds of the actions--are going to the deuce, simply because they have the opportunity of going. And the children--it doesn't bear thinking of! Well--no good haranguing! I'm ashamed of my country in this matter--I have been for a long time--and I mean to help Barnes out, _coûte que coûte_! And as to the money, Barnes, you and I'll discuss that."
Barnes lifted a face that quivered, and he and Boyson exchanged looks.
Penrose glanced at the pair. That imaginative power, combined with the power of drudgery, which was in process of making a great lawyer out of a Balliol scholar, showed him something typical and dramatic in the two figures:--in Boyson, on the one hand, so lithe, serviceable, and resolved, a helpful, mercurial man, ashamed of his country in this one respect, because he adored her in so many others, penitent and patriot in one:--in Barnes, on the other, so heavy, inert, and bewildered, a ship-wrecked suppliant as it were, clinging to the knees of that very America which had so lightly and irresponsibly wronged him.
"Is there any chance of Mrs. Barnes's marrying again?" he asked.
"I never heard of anyone." Roger gave a short, excited laugh. "What she's done, she's done because she was tired of me, not because she was in love with anyone else. That was her great score in the divorce case--that there was nobody."
Biting and twisting his lip, in a trick that recalled to French the beautiful Eton lad, cracking his brains in pupil-room over a bit of Latin prose, Roger glanced, frowning, from one to the other of these three men who felt for him, whose resentment of the wrong that had been done him, whose pity for his calamity showed plainly enough through their reticent speech.