have given you. I never deceived you as to that. I told
you I had not that love to give; not--as you have so unjustly
hinted--because I had given it to another man, but because I was then
incapable of love. I had no thought of any one beyond myself. I was
miserably ignorant and egoistic. It was in ignorance and egoism that
I took the position of your wife, but I think from the first that I
have tried, as I could, to fulfil its obligations. I have tried to be
and to appear what you would wish. And I am not unmindful of the
honor and distinction which my marriage to you has conferred upon
me."

"Gad! I should hope not! One of the biggest positions in England!" he
exclaimed, in a tone of scornful irritation. With these words he rose
and left the room.

Bettina's pride was deeply wounded. It had been that new assertion of
the control of duty which had led her to say these things to her
husband. She had conquered much in herself before speaking, and she
felt that she had a right to resent the almost brutal insensibility
with which he had received her words.

As she turned from the breakfast-room and mounted to her own
apartments she felt conscious of a new humiliation in her life. Up to
this time she had believed that Lord Hurdly would have been incapable
of such speech as he had used to her that morning. She had done a
good deal--more than was required of her, she told herself--in
speaking to him as she had done after his words in the early part of
their conversation, and now it seemed plain to her that she had
fulfilled her whole duty toward him, and that if it had done no good,
the fault was on his side and not on hers.

Once in her own rooms, she gave herself up to profoundly sorrowful
thoughts. She was only twenty-two. How long the path of her future
life looked, and whither would it lead? She had attained all that
any woman could desire in the way of the world's bestowment. She did
not underrate the value of this. On the contrary, it was as essential
to one part of her nature as something far different in the way of
human possibility was to another part. She did not lose her hold upon
the actual because she was striving after the unattained. All this
power and admiration was very important to her, though she felt the
insufficiency of mere worldly prosperity. "Pleasure to have it, none;
to lose it, pain," were words that very nearly fitted her state of
mind. At the thought of going back to the obscurity she had co