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Father Consett said:

'This immorality you talk about in your husband...I've never noticed it. I saw a good deal of him when I stayed with you for the week before your child was born. I talked with him a great deal. Except in the matter of the two communions--and even in these I don't know that we differed so much--I found him perfectly sound.'

'Sound.' Mrs Satterthwaite said with sudden emphasis; 'of course he's sound. It isn't even the word. He's the best ever. There was your father, for a good man...and him. That's an end of it.'

'Ah,' Sylvia said, 'you don't know...Look here. Try and be just. Suppose I'm looking at The Times at breakfast and say, not having spoken to him for a week: "It's wonderful what the doctors are doing. Have you seen the latest?" And at once he'll be on his high-horse--he knows everything!--and he'll prove...prove...that all unhealthy children must be lethal-chambered or the world will go to pieces. And it's like being hypnotised; you can't think of what to answer him. Or he'll reduce you to speechless rage by proving that murderers ought not to be executed. And then I'll ask, casually, if children ought to be lethal-chambered for being constipated. Because Marchant--that's the nurse--is always whining that the child's bowels aren't regular and the dreadful diseases that leads to. Of course that hurts him. For he's perfectly soppy about that child, though he half knows it isn't his own...But that's what I mean by immorality. He'll profess that murderers ought to be preserved in order to breed from because they're bold fellows, and innocent little children executed because they're sick...And he'll almost make you believe it, though you're on the point of retching at the ideas.'