er than...."
And he set a day.

"If Westboro', poor devil, has to look forward to a life of this
unaccompanied grandeur," he pitied him. The lines and files of
soft-footed, impersonal servants, the perfect stilted attention, the
silence, and the inhumanness of a man's lonely life, became intolerable
to Jimmy Bulstrode. Even though Frances, Duchess of Westboro', had
truly said that the castle was a delightful home, Bulstrode began to
wonder what that word comprised or meant: certainly nothing like his
occupation of another man's house or like any life that is lived alone.

At the end of the week that the American spent at Westboro' he had
condensed the castle, as he said to himself, as far as possible, to the
proportions of a Harlem flat, and he lived in it. In the almost small
breakfast room whose windows gave on the terrace, and where all the
December sun that was visible came to find him, he took his meals; each
of them but dinner, which was determinedly and imperially served by
five men in one of the dining-rooms, and at which function, as he
expressed it, he shut his eyes and just ate blindly through. He lived
out of doors all day, took his tea in his dressing-room, and read and
smoked until the august dinner hour called him down to dress and dine
alone. For a week he lived "without sight of a human being," so he
said, for the domestics were only machines. And, towards the end of
the week, he would have gone to see any one: an enemy would have been
too easy, and the only person within range was, of course, the Duchess
of Westboro'.

Westboro' had made a confidant of Bulstrode, and the woman had not.
Bulstrode liked it in her. To be sure, the cases were quite different:
there was no reason why the man deserted and bruised in his pride and
in his heart, should not have talked to his old friend. Westboro'
accused himself of weakness.

"I've blabbed like a woman," he acknowledged ruefully.

The Duchess had not spoken nor had she, on the other hand, with the
fine courage of the true woman, been in any eager haste to discover
what her husband had said of her, nor had she asked if he had spoken at
all. On the other hand, aided by an extreme patience and with still
greater delicacy, she had waited, understanding that her guest, whose
mettle and character she knew would not permit him to betray a trust,
might, however naively, disclose what he knew without being conscious
of it.

But if Bulstrode gave hims