At last he resolved that he would tell Lady Laura the whole truth,—­not the truth about the duel, but the truth about Violet Effingham, and ask for her assistance.  When making this resolution, I think that he must have forgotten much that he had learned of his friend’s character; and by making it, I think that he showed also that he had not learned as much as his opportunities might have taught him.  He knew Lady Laura’s obstinacy of purpose, he knew her devotion to her brother, and he knew also how desirous she had been that her brother should win Violet Effingham for himself.  This knowledge should, I think, have sufficed to show him how improbable it was that Lady Laura should assist him in his enterprise.  But beyond all this was the fact,—­a fact as to the consequences of which Phineas himself was entirely blind, beautifully ignorant,—­that Lady Laura had once condescended to love himself.  Nay;—­she had gone farther than this, and had ventured to tell him, even after her marriage, that the remembrance of some feeling that had once dwelt in her heart in regard to him was still a danger to her.  She had warned him from Loughlinter, and then had received him in London;—­and now he selected her as his confidante in this love affair!  Had he not been beautifully ignorant and most modestly blind, he would surely have placed his confidence elsewhere.

It was not that Lady Laura Kennedy ever confessed to herself the existence of a vicious passion.  She had, indeed, learned to tell herself that she could not love her husband; and once, in the excitement of such silent announcements to herself, she had asked herself whether her heart was quite a blank, and had answered herself by desiring Phineas Finn to absent himself from Loughlinter.  During all the subsequent winter she had scourged herself inwardly for her own imprudence, her quite unnecessary folly in so doing.  What! could not she, Laura Standish, who from her earliest years of girlish womanhood had resolved that she would use the world as men use it, and not as women do,—­could not she have felt the slight shock of a passing tenderness for a handsome youth without allowing the feeling to be a rock before her big enough and sharp enough for the destruction of her entire barque?  Could not she command, if not her heart, at any rate her mind, so that she might safely assure herself that, whether this man or any man was here or there, her course would be unaltered?  What though Phineas Finn had been in the same house with her throughout all the winter, could not she have so lived with him on terms of friendship, that every deed and word and look of her friendship might have been open to her husband,—­or open to all the world?  She could have done so.  She told herself that that was not,—­need not have been her great calamity.  Whether she could endure the dull, monotonous control of her slow but imperious lord,—­or whether she must not rather tell him that it was not to be endured,—­that was her trouble.  So she told herself, and again admitted Phineas to her intimacy in London.  But, nevertheless, Phineas, had he not been beautifully ignorant and most blind to his own achievements, would not have expected from Lady Laura Kennedy assistance with Miss Violet Effingham.