friends--don't you see?
There's where it comes in.'

'All the same, you'll be doing what you repudiate; you'll be making use
for your own ends of what you wouldn't otherwise have anything to do
with. You're in a false position; you can't escape that by
sophistries.'

'If I am, I shall have to be more than ever careful not to make it
falser by throwing veils over it,' said Prudence Varley consideringly.

She had the air of a person of a very delicate sense of
justice--delicate almost to exaggeration. One detected it in her
farsighted grey eyes, with the twinkle that lurked just within call.

Warren chuckled.

'Poor model! You needn't make it so hard as all that for her; let her
have a veil or two--it's so much more comfortable.'

Prudence shook her head with decision.

'It wouldn't be fair; it would be ugly.'

Warren smiled again--at her characteristic habit of arriving, with great
deliberation, at her own position in a matter, and remaining in it
unshaken. If to her perception an immense difference stretched between
the frankness of taking copy as such, and ending there, and the course
of tact and sympathy and 'achievement of intimacy' which his mother
pursued, no accusations of sophistry or overniceness would bridge that
gulf to her.

'Well,' Venables said, half defensively, 'Mother really is interested,
you know--very much so.'

Prudence frowned over it, half abstractedly.

'As I see it, you either like people or you don't. If you don't, and yet
make use of them, they've got to know how the thing stands and all about
it.'

'The Crevequers, you know,' Venables said, 'are quite clever enough to
know "all about it," even if you do use a veil or two.'

'Are they?' Prudence's eyes mused. 'Oh, I dare say they're clever enough
to know. But, Warren, I have a feeling about them--it came to me in the
middle of lunch, quite suddenly--that they _don't_ know; that, somehow,
either because they are made so, or because they've missed their
chances, they know--well, really very little indeed about themselves and
how they stand. And that--if that's so--makes it worse; because, do you
see, if we accepted them, they would take it naturally, and be content
to be accepted; and all the time there would be all kinds of things
between us, that we knew of and that they didn't. That would be ugly.
Don't you see? But if we don't accept them, the things between don't
matter; it's all right and fair.'

'Well, it may be. Anyhow