elf or his host away, the Duchess made no
sign that she had profited by indiscretions. The impersonality of
their conversations was indeed a relief to Bulstrode, and it made it
possible for him to feel himself less a traitor at the Duke's hearth.
But she talked very sweetly, too, of her children. She had the second
picture to the Duke's of the little boys, a picture like the one
Bulstrode had seen at the castle, and showed it to him as the father
had done.

"Westboro' has the companion to this," he had not minded telling her as
they sat together in the small room he had grown to know as well as the
larger rooms of the castle. And at the end of a few moments Bulstrode
quite blurted out: "Why, in Heaven's name do you women make men suffer
so?"

The Duchess, who had been working, dropped her bit of muslin and
looked, with her cherry lips parted and her great serious eyes, for all
the world like a lady in a gift book. Her face was eighteenth century
and child-like.

Bulstrode nodded. "Oh, yes, you've got so easily the upper hand, the
very least of you, you know, over the best of us. It's such an unfair
supremacy. You've got such a clever knowledge of little things, such a
sense of the scale of the feelings, and you certainly make the very
most of your power over us all. Can't you--" and his eyes, half
serious and half reproachful, seemed, as he looked at her, to question
all the womankind he knew--"Can't you ever love us well enough just
quite simply to make us happy?"

The Duchess had taken up her sewing again, and her eyes were upon it.
Bulstrode waited for a little, following her stitches through the
muslin and the flash of her thimble in the light.

"Can't you?" he softly repeated. "Isn't it, after all, a good sort of
way of spending one's life, this making another happy?"

"American women aren't taught so, you know," she said. "It isn't
taught us that the end and aim of our existence is to make a man happy."

Her companion didn't seem at all surprised.

"And so you see," she went on, "those of us that do learn that after
all there may be something in what you say--those of us that learn,
only find it out after a lot of hard experiences, and it is sometimes
too late!"

She seemed to think his direct question called for a distinct answer,
for she admitted: "Oh, yes, of course there are some of us who would
give a great deal to try. And you see, moreover," she went on with her
subject as she turned