slept
soundly all night. Her last sleep, I won't say of innocence--that word
would not render my exact meaning, because it has a special meaning of
its own--but I will say: of that ignorance, or better still, of that
unconsciousness of the world's ways, the unconsciousness of danger, of
pain, of humiliation, of bitterness, of falsehood. An unconsciousness
which in the case of other beings like herself is removed by a gradual
process of experience and information, often only partial at that, with
saving reserves, softening doubts, veiling theories. Her
unconsciousness of the evil which lives in the secret thoughts and
therefore in the open acts of mankind, whenever it happens that evil
thought meets evil courage; her unconsciousness was to be broken into
with profane violence with desecrating circumstances, like a temple
violated by a mad, vengeful impiety. Yes, that very young girl, almost
no more than a child--this was what was going to happen to her. And if
you ask me, how, wherefore, for what reason? I will answer you: Why, by
chance! By the merest chance, as things do happen, lucky and unlucky,
terrible or tender, important or unimportant; and even things which are
neither, things so completely neutral in character that you would wonder
why they do happen at all if you didn't know that they, too, carry in
their insignificance the seeds of further incalculable chances.

Of course, all the chances were that de Barral should have fallen upon a
perfectly harmless, naive, usual, inefficient specimen of respectable
governess for his daughter; or on a commonplace silly adventuress who
would have tried, say, to marry him or work some other sort of common
mischief in a small way. Or again he might have chanced on a model of
all the virtues, or the repository of all knowledge, or anything equally
harmless, conventional, and middle class. All calculations were in his
favour; but, chance being incalculable, he fell upon an individuality
whom it is much easier to define by opprobrious names than to classify
in a calm and scientific spirit--but an individuality certainly, and a
temperament as well. Rare? No. There is a certain amount of what I
would politely call unscrupulousness in all of us. Think for instance
of the excellent Mrs Fyne, who herself, and in the bosom of her family,
resembled a governess of a conventional type. Only, her mental excesses
were theoretical, hedged in by so much humane feeling and conve