her
youth, the years had passed like so many funeral processions, each
bearing some pleasant scandal to its burial. Then there had come the
dreary funeral feast, and then the days of mournful rehabilitation. Oh,
that rehabilitation! There had been three years of it. Three years of
exhausting struggle for a position in society, three years of crawling,
and pushing, and scrambling, and climbing. There had been a dubious
triumph. Then six years of respectable futility, ambiguous courtship,
and palpable frustration. After all that, there was something flattering
in the thought that, at forty-five, she should yet find her name still
coupled with Walter Majendie's in a passionate adventure.

It might easily have been, but for Walter's imbecile, suicidal devotion
to his wife. He had got nothing out of his marriage. Worse than nothing.
He was the laughing-stock of all his friends who were in the secret; who
saw him grovelling at the heels of a disagreeable woman who had made him
conspicuous by her aversion. Of course, it might easily have been.

Sarah's imagination (for she had an imagination) drew out all the
sweetness that there was for it in that idea. Then it occurred to her
sound, prosaic commonsense that a reputation is still a reputation, all
the more precious if somewhat precariously acquired; that, though you may
as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb, hanging is very poor fun when for
years you have seen nothing of sheep or lamb either; that, in short, she
must take steps to save her reputation.

The shortest way to save it was the straight way. She would go straight
to Mrs. Majendie with her proofs. Her duty to herself justified the
somewhat unusual step. And, more than her duty, Sarah loved a scene. She
loved to play with other people's emotions and to exhibit her own. She
wanted to see how Mrs. Majendie would take it; how the white-faced,
high-handed lady would look when she was told that her husband had
consoled himself for her high-handedness. She had always been possessed
by an ungovernable curiosity with regard to Majendie's wife.

She did not know Majendie's wife, but she knew Majendie. She knew all
about the separation and its cause. That was where she had come in. She
divined that Mrs. Majendie had never forgiven her husband for his old
intimacy with her. It was Mrs. Majendie's jealousy that had driven him
out of the house, into the arms of pretty Maggie. Where, she wondered,
would Mrs. Majendie's jealous