The Duchess, too.  Why had she treated him so well at first, and so cavalierly after dinner?  Her manners were really too uncertain.

What was the matter, and why did she dislike him?  He pondered over it a good deal, and with much soreness of spirit.  Like many men capable of very selfish or very cruel conduct, he was extremely sensitive, and took keen notice of the fact that a person liked or disliked him.

If the Duchess disliked him it could not be merely on account of the Simla story, even though the old maid might conceivably have given her a jaundiced account.  The Duchess knew nothing of Aileen, and was little influenced, so far as he had observed her, by considerations of abstract justice or propriety, affecting persons whom she had never seen.

No, she was Julie’s friend, the little wilful lady, and it was for Julie she ruffled her feathers, like an angry dove.

So his thoughts had come back to Julie, though, indeed, it seemed to him that they were never far from her.  As he looked absently from the train windows on the flying landscape, Julie’s image hovered between him and it—­a magic sun, flooding soul and senses with warmth.  How unconsciously, how strangely his feelings had changed towards her!  That coolness of temper and nerve he had been able to preserve towards her for so long was, indeed, breaking down.  He recognized the danger, and wondered where it would lead him.  What a fascinating, sympathetic creature!—­and, by George! what she had done for him!

Aileen!  Aileen was a little sylph, a pretty child-angel, white-winged and innocent, who lived in a circle of convent thoughts, knowing nothing of the world, and had fallen in love with him as the first man who had ever made love to her.  But this intelligent, full-blooded woman, who could understand at a word, or a half word, who had a knowledge of affairs which many a high-placed man might envy, with whom one never had a dull moment—­this courted, distinguished Julie Le Breton—­his mind swelled with half-guilty pride at the thought that for six months he had absorbed all her energies, that a word from him could make her smile or sigh, that he could force her to look at him with eyes so melting and so troubled as those with which she had given him her hands—­her slim, beautiful hands—­that night in Grosvenor Square.

How freedom became her!  Dependency had dropped from her, like a cast-off cloak, and beside her fresh, melancholy charm, the airs and graces of a child of fashion and privilege like the little Duchess appeared almost cheap and trivial.  Poor Julie!  No doubt some social struggle was before her.  Lady Henry was strong, after all, in this London world, and the solider and stupider people who get their way in the end were not, she thought, likely to side with Lady Henry’s companion in a quarrel where the facts of the story were unquestionably, at first sight, damaging to Miss Le Breton.  Julie would have her hours of bitterness and humiliation; and she would conquer by boldness, if she conquered at all—­by originality, by determining to live her own life.  That would preserve for her the small circle, if it lost her the large world.  And the small circle was what she lived for, what she ought, at any rate, to live for.