The engagement of Constance Bride as resident secretary resulted no doubt from this craving in the old lady’s mind for human affection.  Perhaps she felt that she had behaved with less than justice to the girl’s father; moreover, Constance as a little child had greatly won her liking, and in the young woman she perceived a capability, an independence, which strongly appealed to her.  Thus far they had got on very well together, and Lady Ogram began to think that she had found in Constance what she had long been looking for—­one of her own sex equal to the burden of a great responsibility and actuated by motives pure enough to make her worthy of a high privilege.

Had her girlhood fallen into brutal hands, Arabella’s native savagery would doubtless have developed strange excesses in the life of a social outlaw.  The companionship of Quentin Ogram, a mild idealist, good-naturedly critical of the commonplace, though it often wearied her and irritated her primitive interests, was a civilising influence, the results of which continued to manifest themselves after the baronet’s death.  On the aesthetic side Arabella profited not at all; to the beautiful she ever presented a hard insensibility, and in later years she ceased even to affect pleasure in the things of nature or art which people generally admired.  Her flowery and leafy drawing-room indicated no personal taste; it came of a suggestion by her gardener when she converted to her own use the former smoking-room; finding that people admired and thought it original, she made the arrangement a permanence, anxious only that the plants exhibited should be nicer and finer than those possessed by her neighbours.  On the other hand, her moral life had from the first shown capacity of expansion; it held at its service an intellect, of no very fine quality indeed, but acute and energetic.  In all practical affairs she was greatly superior to the average woman, adding to woman’s meticulous sense of interest and persistent diplomacy a breadth of view found only in exceptional males; this faculty the circumstances of her life richly fostered, and, by anomaly, advancing age enlarged, instead of contracting, the liberality of her spirit.  After fifty years told, when ordinary mortals have long since given their measure in heart and brain, Lady Ogram steadily advanced.  Solitary possessor of wealth, autocrat over a little world of her own, instead of fossilising in dull dignity, she proved herself receptive of many influences with which the time was fraught.  She cast off beliefs—­or what she had held as such—­ and adopted others; she exchanged old prejudices for new forms of zeal; above all, she chose to be in touch with youth and aspiration rather than with disillusioned or retrospective age.  Only when failing health shadowed the way before her did she begin to lose that confident carriage of the mind which, together with her profound materialism, had made worry and regret and apprehension things unknown to her.