ed this out to God--if she
spent her present nest-egg on a holiday she could quite soon accumulate
another. Frederick pressed money on her; and it would only mean, while
she rolled up a second egg, that for a time her contributions to the
parish charities would be less. And then it could be the next nest-egg
whose original corruption would be purged away by the use to which it
was finally put.

For Mrs. Arbuthnot, who had no money of her own, was obliged to
live on the proceeds of Frederick's activities, and her very nest-egg
was the fruit, posthumously ripened, of ancient sin. The way Frederick
made his living was one of the standing distresses of her life. He
wrote immensely popular memoirs, regularly, every year, of the
mistresses of kings. There were in history numerous kings who had had
mistresses, and there were still more numerous mistresses who had had
kings; so that he had been able to publish a book of memoirs during
each year of his married life, and even so there were greater further
piles of these ladies waiting to be dealt with. Mrs. Arbuthnot was
helpless. Whether she liked it or not, she was obliged to live on the
proceeds. He gave her a dreadful sofa once, after the success of his
Du Barri memoir, with swollen cushions and soft, receptive lap, and it
seemed to her a miserable thing that there, in her very home, should
flaunt this re-incarnation of a dead old French sinner.

Simply good, convinced that morality is the basis of happiness,
the fact that she and Frederick should draw their sustenance from
guilt, however much purged by the passage of centuries, was one of the
secret reasons of her sadness. The more the memoired lady had
forgotten herself, the more his book about her was read and the more
free-handed he was to his wife; and all that he gave her was spent,
after adding slightly to her nest-egg--for she did hope and believe
that some day people would cease to want to read of wickedness, and
then Frederick would need supporting--on helping the poor. The parish
flourished because, to take a handful at random, of the ill-behavior of
the ladies Du Barri, Montespan, Pompadour, Ninon de l'Enclos, and even
of learned Maintenon. The poor were the filter through which the money
was passed, to come out, Mrs. Arbuthnot hoped, purified. She could do
no more. She had tried in days gone by to think the situation out, to
discover the exact right course for her to take, but had found it, as
she