By this time Straker's tact and delicacy were all gone.
"Yes," said Miss Tarrant, "he went pretty far. But, on the whole, it's just as well he did, seeing what's come of it."
"Well, I think he realizes that he has a soul. That's something."
"I didn't know it was his soul you were concerned with."
"He didn't, either. Did he tell you what I said to him?"
"He told me you gave him a dressing down. But there was something that he wouldn't tell. What _did_ you say to him?"
"I said I supposed, after all, he had a soul, and I asked him what he meant to do about it."
"That's what I want him back for," she said, "to see. Whatever he does with it, practically I've saved it."
"Could any other woman have done it? Do you see Mary Probyn doing it?"
"It was the only way. You must," she said, "have temperament."
"You didn't like the way I did it. I can't help that. I had to use the means at my disposal. If I hadn't led him on how could I have got hold of him? If I hadn't led him further how could I have got him on an inch?"
"So that," said Straker quietly, "is what you did it for?"
"You've seen him," she answered. "You don't seriously suppose I could have done it for anything else! What possible use had I for that young man?"
He remembered that that was what she had said about Mr. Higginson. But he confessed that, for a lady in a disconcerting situation, she had shown genius in extricating herself.
Fanny's house party broke up and scattered the next day. A week later Straker and Will Brocklebank saw Furnival in the Park. He was driving a motor beyond his means in the society of a lady whom he certainly could not afford.
"Good God!" said Brocklebank. "That's Philippa."
By which he meant, not that Furnival's lady in the least resembled Philippa, but that she showed the heights to which Philippa had led him on.
Brocklebank agreed with Straker that they had got to get him out of that.
It was difficult, because the thing had come upon Furnival like a madness. He would have had more chance if he had been a man with a talent or an absorbing occupation, a politician, an editor, a journalist; if he had even been, Brocklebank lamented, on the London Borough Council it might have made him less dependent on the sympathy of ruinous ladies. But the Home Office provided no competitive distraction.