be dangerous to ME. I know exactly how far I am going--exactly the
amount of excitement I shall get out of it all. Neither Willoughby nor
he deserve an iota of consideration. I shall amuse myself. So! No
more.... But he can't know that. He has never thought about ME. He has
thought of nothing but his own cross-grained pride and selfish egoism.
No man of ordinary breeding or SAVOIR-FAIRE would have gone off like
that!'

She forgot in her condemnation of Colin to make allowance for the
primal nature of the man; for a certain kinship in him with the loftier
type of savage, whose woman must be his wholly, or else deliberately
relinquished to the successful rival, and into whose calculation the
subtleties of social jurisprudence would not naturally enter.

Nor did she remember at the moment that Maule had been described by her
own relatives as a person of neither birth nor breeding--a
fortune-hunter--not by any means a modern Bayard. He at least was a man
of the world, she thought, and would appreciate the situation. He had
lost that touch of unaccustomedness--she hardly knew how to describe
it--which had often irritated her in their former relation. In their
talk that day he seemed much more at home than she was in the world she
had once belonged to. He spoke of 'personages' with the ease of
familiar acquaintance. Apparently, he had got into quite the right
set--a rather political set, she gathered. He told her that he had been
pressed to stand for a well-nursed Liberal Constituency, and implied
that but for the catastrophe of his wife's death he would now be seated
in Parliament, with a fair prospect in the future of place and
distinction. Of course, it was the money which had done it, she told
herself, though he had undoubted cleverness, she knew, and, as he
pointed out, his experience in a particular South American
republic--very much to the fore just now in European diplomacy--stood
to his advantage. His marriage had given him opportunity. He alluded
without bad taste to his dead wife's generosity. She had left him her
entire fortune unfettered. He was now a rich man. He explained that she
had had none but very distant relations and that, otherwise, charitable
institutions would have benefited. She had been a very good woman, he
said--a woman with whom nine hundred out of a thousand decent men would
have been perfectly happy. He let it be inferred that he was the
thousandth man. His eyes, not his lips told her the rea