oney. She had no knowledge that marriage
of itself had given her the right to such interference; and had such
knowledge been hers she would have had no desire to interfere. She
hoped that the carriage and sham jewels would be continued to her;
but she did not know how to frame any question on the subject.
Touching the other difficulty,--the Conway Dalrymple difficulty,--she
had her ideas. The tenderness of her friendship had been trodden upon
by and outraged by the rough foot of an overbearing husband, and she
was ill-used. She would obey. It was becoming to her as a wife that
she should submit. She would give up Conway Dalrymple, and would
induce him,--in spite of his violent attachment to herself,--to take
a wife. She herself would choose a wife for him. She herself would,
with suicidal hands, destroy the romance of her own life, since an
overbearing, brutal husband demanded that it should be destroyed. She
would sacrifice her own feelings, and do all in her power to bring
Conway Dalrymple and Clara Van Siever together. If, after that,
some poet did not immortalise her friendship in Byronic verse, she
certainly would not get her due. Perhaps Conway Dalrymple would
himself become a poet in order that this might be done properly. For
it must be understood that, though she expected Conway Dalrymple to
marry, she expected also that he should be Byronically wretched after
his marriage on account of his love for herself.

But there was certainly something wrong over and beyond the Dalrymple
difficulty. The servants were not as civil as they used to be, and
her husband, when she suggested to him a little dinner-party, snubbed
her most unmercifully. The giving of dinner-parties had been his
glory, and she had made the suggestion simply with the view of
pleasing him. "If the world were going round the wrong way, a woman
would still want a party," he had said, sneering at her. "It was
of you I was thinking, Dobbs," she replied; "not of myself. I care
little for such gatherings." After that she retired to her own room
with a romantic tear in each eye, and told herself that, had chance
thrown Conway Dalrymple into her way before she had seen Dobbs
Broughton, she would have been the happiest woman in the world. She
sat for a while looking into vacancy, and thinking that it would be
very nice to break her heart. How should she set about it? Should
she take to her bed and grow thin? She would begin by eating no
dinner for ever so m