In addition to these occupations, Mrs. Carr had had various crazes at different stages of her widowhood, which had now endured for some five years.  She had travelled, she had “gone-in for art;” once she had speculated a little, but finding that, for a woman, it was a losing game, she was too shrewd to continue this last pastime.  But she always came back to her beetles and her mummies.

Still, with all her money, her places, her offers of marriage, and her self-made occupations, Mildred Carr was essentially “a weary woman, sunk deep in ease, and sated with her life.”  Within that little frame of hers, there beat a great active heart, ever urging her onwards towards an unknown end.  She would describe herself as an “ill-regulated woman,” and the description was not without justice, for she did not possess that placid, even mind which is so necessary to the comfort of English ladies, and which enables many of them to bury a husband or a lover as composedly as they take him.  She would have given worlds to be able to fall in love with some one, to fill up the daily emptiness of her existence with another’s joys and griefs, but she could not.  Men passed before her in endless procession, all sorts and conditions of them, and for the most part were anxious to marry her, but they might as well have been a string of wax dolls for aught she could care about them.  To her eyes, they were nothing more than a succession of frock-coats and tall hats, full of shine and emptiness, signifying nothing.  For their opinion, too, and that of the society which they helped to form, she had a most complete and wrong-headed contempt.  She cared nothing for the ordinary laws of social life, and was prepared to break through them on emergency, as a wasp breaks through a spider’s web.  Perhaps she guessed that a good deal of breaking would be forgiven to the owner of such a lovely face, and more than twenty thousand a year.  With all this, she was extremely observant, and possessed, unknown to herself, great powers of mind, and great, though dormant, capacities for passion.  In short, this little woman, with the baby face, smiling and serene as the blue sky that hides the gathering hurricane, was rather odder than the majority of her sex, which is perhaps saying a great deal.

One day, about a week before Arthur departed from the Abbey House, Agatha Terry was sitting in the blue drawing-room in the house in Grosvenor Square, when Mrs. Carr came in, almost at a run, slammed the door behind her, and plumped herself down in a chair with a sigh of relief.

“Agatha, give orders to pack up.  We will go to Madeira by the next boat.”

“Goodness gracious, Mildred! across that dreadful bay again; and just think how hot it will be, and the beginning of the season too.”

“Now, Agatha, I’m going, and there’s an end of it, so it is no use arguing.  You can stay here, and give a series of balls and dinners, if you like.”