Through the beaming smile with which he regarded me as he reasoned thus, there now broke forth a look of disinterested benevolence quite astonishing.

“Besides,” he said, pursuing his argument in his tone of lighthearted conviction, “if I don’t go anywhere for pain⁠—which would be a perversion of the intention of my being, and a monstrous thing to do⁠—why should I go anywhere to be the cause of pain? If I went to see our young friends in their present ill-regulated state of mind, I should give them pain. The associations with me would be disagreeable. They might say, ‘This is the man who had pounds and who can’t pay pounds,’ which I can’t, of course; nothing could be more out of the question! Then kindness requires that I shouldn’t go near them⁠—and I won’t.”

He finished by genially kissing my hand and thanking me. Nothing but Miss Summerson’s fine tact, he said, would have found this out for him.