Had she done with them for good and all?  That was what marrying the Squire meant.

A business marriage—­on her side, for an income, a home, a career; on his, for a companion, a secretary, an agent.  Well, she said to herself as she calmed down, that she could face; but supposing, after all, that the Squire was putting more into the scales than she?  A sudden fear grew strong in her—­fear lest this man should have more heart, more romance in him than she had imagined possible—­that while she was thinking of a business partnership, the Squire was expecting, was about to offer, something quite different.

The thought scared and repelled her.  If that were indeed the case, she would bid Mannering a long and final farewell.

But no!—­she reassured herself; she recalled the Squire’s passionate absorption in his archaeological pursuits; how his dependence upon her, his gratitude to her, his surprising fits of docility, were all due to the fact that she helped him to pursue them—­that his mind sharpened itself against hers—­that her hand and brain were the slaves of his restless intelligence.

That was all—­that must, that should be all.  She thought vigorously of the intellectual comradeships of history—­beginning with Michael Angelo and Vittoria Colonna.  They were not certainly quite on all fours with her own situation—­but give modern life and the new woman time!

Suppose, then, these anxieties set at rest, and that immediately, within twenty-four hours, or a week, the Squire were to ask her to marry him and were ready to understand the matter as she did—­what else stood in the way?

Then, slowly, in the darkness of the room, there rose before her the young figures of the twins, with their arms round each other’s necks, as she had often seen them—­Desmond and Pamela.  And they looked at her with hostile eyes!

‘Cuckoo!—­intriguer!—­we don’t want you!—­we won’t accept you!’

But after all, as Elizabeth reflected not without a natural exasperation, she was not—­consciously—­a cuckoo; she was not an intriguer; there was nothing of the Becky Sharp about her at all; it would have been so very much simpler if there had been!  To swallow the Squire and Mannering at one gulp, to turn out the twins, to put Mrs. Gaddesden—­who, as Elizabeth had already discovered, was constantly making rather greedy demands upon her father—­on rations according to her behaviour, to bring in her own poor mother and all her needy relations—­to reign supreme, in fact, over Mannering and the county—­nothing would be easier.

The only thing that stood in the way was that the Squire’s secretary happened to be a nice woman—­and not an adventuress.  Elizabeth’s sense of humour showed her the kind of lurid drama that Pamela no doubt was concocting about her—­perhaps with the help of Beryl—­the two little innocents!  Elizabeth recalled the intriguing French ‘companion’ in War and Peace who inveigles the old Squire.  And as for the mean and mercenary stepmothers of fiction, they can be collected by the score.  That, no doubt, was how Pamela thought of her.  So that, after her involuntary tears, Elizabeth ended in a laughter that was half angry, half affectionate.