s had happened exactly to
agree with her. She was not so ridiculous (she told herself) as to feel
personally aggrieved, but so long as fate, chance, Providence, or the
devil, gave her emotions and desires and talent and will, it was
impossible not to suffer. She might fully recognise that the suffering
was of absolutely no importance in the great scheme of things, but that
did not make the suffering less. If it must be, it must be, and there
was an end to it. Should someone gain by it, that was highly
satisfactory, and more than could be said of most suffering, which
exists, it would seem, only to increase and multiply after the manner of
some dire disease. This was what Hadria dreaded in her own case: that
the loss would not end with her. The children, Martha, everyone who came
under her influence, must share in it.

Henriette irritated her by an approving sweetness of demeanour,
carefully avoiding any look of triumph, or rather triumphing by that air
which said: "I wouldn't crow over you for the world!"

She was evidently brimming over with satisfaction. A great peril, she
felt, had been averted. The family and its reputation were saved.

"You appear to think that the eyes of Europe are riveted on the
Temperley family," said Hadria; "an august race, I know, but there _are_
one or two other branches of the human stock in existence."

"One _must_ consider what people say," said Henriette.

Hadria's time now was filled more and more with detail, since there were
two households instead of one to manage. The new charge was
particularly difficult, because she had not a free hand.

Without entirely abandoning her music, it had, perforce, to fall into
abeyance. Progress was scarcely possible. But as Henriette pointed
out--it gave so much pleasure to others--when Hadria avoided music that
was too severely classical.

At Craddock Place, one evening, she was taken in to dinner by a callow
youth, who found a fertile subject for his wit, in the follies and
excesses of what he called the "new womanhood." It was so delightful, he
said, to come to the country, where women were still charming in the
good old way. He knew that this new womanhood business was only a phase,
don't you know, but upon his word, he was getting tired of it. Not that
he had any objection to women being well educated (Hadria was glad of
that), but he could _not_ stand it when they went out of their sphere,
and put themselves forward and tried to be emanc