then the days of mournful rehabilitation.  Oh, that rehabilitation!  There had been three years of it.  Three years of exhausting struggle for a position in society, three years of crawling, and pushing, and scrambling, and climbing.  There had been a dubious triumph.  Then six years of respectable futility, ambiguous courtship, and palpable frustration.  After all that, there was something flattering in the thought that, at forty-five, she should yet find her name still coupled with Walter Majendie’s in a passionate adventure.

It might easily have been, but for Walter’s imbecile, suicidal devotion to his wife.  He had got nothing out of his marriage.  Worse than nothing.  He was the laughing-stock of all his friends who were in the secret; who saw him grovelling at the heels of a disagreeable woman who had made him conspicuous by her aversion.  Of course, it might easily have been.

Sarah’s imagination (for she had an imagination) drew out all the sweetness that there was for it in that idea.  Then it occurred to her sound, prosaic commonsense that a reputation is still a reputation, all the more precious if somewhat precariously acquired; that, though you may as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb, hanging is very poor fun when for years you have seen nothing of sheep or lamb either; that, in short, she must take steps to save her reputation.

The shortest way to save it was the straight way.  She would go straight to Mrs. Majendie with her proofs.  Her duty to herself justified the somewhat unusual step.  And, more than her duty, Sarah loved a scene.  She loved to play with other people’s emotions and to exhibit her own.  She wanted to see how Mrs. Majendie would take it; how the white-faced, high-handed lady would look when she was told that her husband had consoled himself for her high-handedness.  She had always been possessed by an ungovernable curiosity with regard to Majendie’s wife.

She did not know Majendie’s wife, but she knew Majendie.  She knew all about the separation and its cause.  That was where she had come in.  She divined that Mrs. Majendie had never forgiven her husband for his old intimacy with her.  It was Mrs. Majendie’s jealousy that had driven him out of the house, into the arms of pretty Maggie.  Where, she wondered, would Mrs. Majendie’s jealousy of pretty Maggie drive him?

Though Sarah knew Majendie, that was more than she would undertake to say.  But the more she thought about it, the more she wondered; and the more she wondered, the more she desired to know.

She wondered whether Mrs. Majendie had heard the report.  From all she could gather, it was hardly likely.  Neither Mrs. Majendie nor her friends mixed in those circles where it went the round.  The scandal of the clubs and of the Park would never reach her in the high seclusion of the house in Prior Street.

Into that house Lady Cayley could not hope to penetrate except by guile.  Once admitted, straightforwardness would be her method.  She must not attempt to give the faintest social colour to her visit.  She must take for granted Mrs. Majendie’s view of her impossibility.  To be sure Mrs. Majendie’s prejudices were moral even more than social.  But moral prejudice could be overcome by cleverness working towards a formidable moral effect.