s, the Duchess said: "Listen to me. I haven't talked at all to
you, let me say something now."

Her companion reflected to himself: "Well, at all events, she's not
going to malign the Duke; that's a foregone conclusion."

The Duchess clasped her hands round her knee and raised her face to him.

"Do you think," she asked, "that there's any egoist as nasty as a
feminine one? Men are admitted to be generally selfish, but we
specialize, and each one of us has the faculty of getting up some new
and peculiar brand, I begin to believe. At any rate, when I married, I
was an egoist, and I've stayed on being one until a very little time
ago. I suppose I must in a way have more or less ornamented my
position, as the papers say. I did have two children as well, and in
that way fulfilled my duty as a Westboro'. But really and truly, I
have never in the least been a wife, and very little of a mother. I
was as silly and vain as could be, and I never for a moment valued my
husband. I wasn't indifferent to my children, but I was absorbed by my
worldly life, and when my little boys were taken ill and died, I was on
a dahabeah on the Nile, and I don't think that Cecil ever forgave us
for being so far away."

She remained quiet for a long time, looking down at her hands, and when
she lifted her face Bulstrode saw that she had wept.

"That," she went on, "broke the ice round my heart, when I came home to
those empty rooms."

He said soothingly, "There, there, my child."

"Oh, let me go on," she urged him, "let me speak. I shall probably
never feel like doing so again. But at that time when I turned to find
my husband, I discovered that I had no power over him, and I realized
that for years I had not possessed his love. I suppose you'll tell me
that it is unusual for a woman to see so clearly as this. Perhaps it
is. At any rate, just because I did so clearly, I forgave him when he
came to me last year, at Cannes."

"You were wonderful!" he repeated again, "perfectly noble, and, as I
said before, Westboro' did not deserve you."

She did not here, as she had done before, catch him up; on the
contrary, after a few moments, she asked him point-blank:

"What then do you advise us, knowing us both, to do?"

He was distinctly disappointed that she should have put the question to
him, and gave her time to withdraw it as he asked tentatively: "You
really feel that you must ask me, Duchess?"

"Tell me, at all events."

"Yo