ntional
reserves, that they amounted to no more than mere libertinage of
thought; whereas the other woman, the governess of Flora de Barral, was,
as you may have noticed, severely practical--terribly practical. No!
Hers was not a rare temperament, except in its fierce resentment of
repression; a feeling which like genius or lunacy is apt to drive people
into sudden irrelevancy. Hers was feminine irrelevancy. A male genius,
a male ruffian, or even a male lunatic, would not have behaved exactly
as she did behave. There is a softness in masculine nature, even the
most brutal, which acts as a check.

While the girl slept those two, the woman of forty, an age in itself
terrible, and that hopeless young "wrong 'un" of twenty-three (also well
connected I believe) had some sort of subdued row in the cleared rooms:
wardrobes open, drawers half pulled out and empty, trunks locked and
strapped, furniture in idle disarray, and not so much as a single scrap
of paper left behind on the tables. The maid, whom the governess and
the pupil shared between them, after finishing with Flora, came to the
door as usual, but was not admitted. She heard the two voices in
dispute before she knocked, and then being sent away retreated at once--
the only person in the house convinced at that time that there was
"something up."

"Dark and, so to speak, inscrutable spaces being met with in life there
must be such places in any statement dealing with life. In what I am
telling you of now--an episode of one of my humdrum holidays in the
green country, recalled quite naturally after all the years by our
meeting a man who has been a blue-water sailor--this evening
confabulation is a dark, inscrutable spot. And we may conjecture what
we like. I have no difficulty in imagining that the woman--of forty,
and the chief of the enterprise--must have raged at large. And perhaps
the other did not rage enough. Youth feels deeply it is true, but it
has not the same vivid sense of lost opportunities. It believes in the
absolute reality of time. And then, in that abominable scamp with his
youth already soiled, withered like a plucked flower ready to be flung
on some rotting heap of rubbish, no very genuine feeling about anything
could exist--not even about the hazards of his own unclean existence. A
sneering half-laugh with some such remark as: `We are properly sold and
no mistake' would have been enough to make trouble in that way. And
then another