Moffatt considered a moment, as if the incident had escaped him. "Did we
meet there?" He seemed benevolently ready for enlightenment. But Ralph
had been assailed by another memory; he recalled that Moffatt had dined
one night in his house, that he and the man who now faced him had sat at
the same table, their wife between them... He was seized with another
dumb gust of fury; but it died out and left him face to face with the
uselessness, the irrelevance of all the old attitudes of appropriation
and defiance. He seemed to be stumbling about in his inherited
prejudices like a modern man in mediaeval armour... Moffatt still sat at
his desk, unmoved and apparently uncomprehending. "He doesn't even
know what I'm feeling," flashed through Ralph; and the whole archaic
structure of his rites and sanctions tumbled down about him.
Through the noise of the crash he heard Moffatt's voice going on without
perceptible change of tone: "About that other matter now...you can't
feel any meaner about it than I do, I can tell you that... but all we've
got to do is to sit tight..."
Ralph turned from the voice, and found himself outside on the landing,
and then in the street below.