rd
Fillingford if he would not take her bribe. Not a woman? How little we
know of ourselves, Jenny! Is not her great triumph--Leonard's triumph,
for which she planned and wrought and risked--is it not a woman's
triumph all over, and her satisfaction in it supremely feminine?

A woman--and, to my thinking, a great woman, too; full of what we call
faults, full of what we hail as virtues--and quite with a mind of her
own as to the value of these qualities--a mind by no means always moving
on orthodox lines. Stubborn, self-willed, tortuous, jealous of
domination, tenacious of liberty (at what cost and risk she had clung to
that till the last moment!), not patient of opposition, suspicious of
any claim to influence or to guide her; generous to magnificence, warm
in affection, broad in mind, very farseeing, full of public spirit,
never daunted, loyal to death, and beyond the grave--that is Jenny--and
yet not all Jenny, for it leaves out the gracious puzzling woman in whom
all these things are embodied; the woman with her bursts of temper, her
fits of petulance, her joyous playfulness, her sudden looks and gestures
of love or friendship; her smiles gay or mysterious, her eyes so full of
fun or so full of thought, flashing while she scolds, mocking while she
cheats, caressing when she cajoles, so straight and honest when
suddenly, after all this, she lays her hand on your arm and says "Dear
friend!" Such is "The Empress"--the great Miss Driver of Breysgate
Priory. Such is my dear friend Jenny, whom I serve in freedom and love
in comradeship. I would that she were what they call her! None fitter
for the place since Great Elizabeth--whom, by the way, she seems to me
to resemble in more than one point of character and temperament.

So we live side by side, and work and play together--with love--but with
no love-making. There are obvious reasons on my side for that last
proviso. I am her servant; the fourth part of twenty-seven pounds per
annum represents, as I have hinted, the most I have earned save the
salary she pays me. I should make a very poor Prince Consort--and Jenny
would never trust me again as long as she lived--though it is equally
certain that she would never tell me so. And there's another reason,
accounting not for my not having done it, but for the odder fact--my not
having wanted to do it. Humble man that I am, yet I was born free and am
entitled not only to the pursuit of happiness, but to the retention of
my li