Evidently, Lady Henry was hardly to be defended.  The thing had been “odious,” indeed.  Two women of great ability and different ages, shut up together and jarring at every point, the elder furiously jealous and exasperated by what seemed to her the affront offered to her high rank and her past ascendency by the social success of her dependant, the other defending herself, first by the arts of flattery and submission, and then, when these proved hopeless, by a social skill that at least wore many of the aspects of intrigue—­these were the essential elements of the situation; and, as her narrative proceeded, Sir Wilfrid admitted to himself that it was hard to see any way out of it.  As to his own sympathies, he did not know what to make of them.

“No.  I have been only too yielding,” said Mademoiselle Le Breton, sorely, when her tale was done.  “I am ashamed when I look back on what I have borne.  But now it has gone too far, and something must be done.  If I go, frankly, Lady Henry will suffer.”

Sir Wilfrid looked at his companion.

“Lady Henry is well aware of it.”

“Yes,” was the calm reply, “she knows it, but she does not realize it.  You see, if it comes to a rupture she will allow no half-measures.  Those who stick to me will have to quarrel with her.  And there will be a great many who will stick to me.”

Sir Wilfrid’s little smile was not friendly.

“It is indeed evident,” he said, “that you have thought it all out.”

Mademoiselle Le Breton did not reply.  They walked on a few minutes in silence, till she said, with a suddenness and in a low tone that startled her companion: 

“If Lady Henry could ever have felt that she humbled me, that I acknowledged myself at her mercy!  But she never could.  She knows that I feel myself as well born as she, that I am not ashamed of my parents, that my principles give me a free mind about such things.”

“Your principles?” murmured Sir Wilfrid.

“You were right,” she turned upon him with a perfectly quiet but most concentrated passion.  “I have had to think things out.  I know, of course, that the world goes with Lady Henry.  Therefore I must be nameless and kinless and hold my tongue.  If the world knew, it would expect me to hang my head.  I don’t! I am as proud of my mother as of my father.  I adore both their memories.  Conventionalities of that kind mean nothing to me.”

“My dear lady—­”

“Oh, I don’t expect you or any one else to feel with me,” said the voice which for all its low pitch was beginning to make him feel as though he were in the centre of a hail-storm.  “You are a man of the world, you knew my parents, and yet I understand perfectly that for you, too, I am disgraced.  So be it!  So be it!  I don’t quarrel with what any one may choose to think, but—­”

She recaptured herself with difficulty, and there was silence.  They were walking through the purple February dusk towards the Marble Arch.  It was too dark to see her face under its delicate veil, and Sir Wilfrid did not wish to see it.  But before he had collected his thoughts sufficiently his companion was speaking again, in a wholly different manner.