A look at the papers to serve for Memoirs was discomposing, and led him to think the secretary could be parted with as soon as he pleased to go:  say, a week hence.

The Memoirs were no longer designed for issue.  He had the impulse to treat them on the spot as the Plan for the Defence of the Country had been treated; and for absolutely obverse reasons.  The secretary and the Memoirs were associated:  one had sprung out of the other.  Moreover, the secretary had witnessed a scene at Steignton.  The young man had done his duty, and would be thanked for that, and dismissed, with a touch of his employer’s hand.  The young man would have made a good soldier—­a better soldier, good as he might be as a scribe.  He ought to have been in his father’s footsteps, and he would then have disciplined or quashed his fantastical ideas.  Perhaps he was right on the point of toning the Memoirs here and there.  Since the scene at Steignton Lord Ormont’s views had changed markedly in relation to everybody about him, and most things.

Weyburn came back at the end of an hour to say that he had left the address with Mrs. May, whom he had seen.

‘A handsome person,’ the earl observed.

‘She must have been very handsome,’ said Weyburn.

’Ah! we fall into their fictions, or life would be a bald business, upon my word!’

Lord Ormont had not uttered it before the sentiment of his greater luck with one of that queer world of the female lottery went through him on a swell of satisfaction, just a wave.

An old-world eye upon women, it seemed to Weyburn.  But the man who could crown a long term of cruel injustice with the harshness to his wife at Steignton would naturally behold women with that eye.

However, he was allowed only to generalize; he could not trust himself to dwell on Lady Ormont and the Aminta inside the shell.  Aminta and Lady Ormont might think as one or diversely of the executioner’s blow she had undergone.  She was a married woman, and she probably regarded the wedding by law as the end a woman has to aim at, and is annihilated by hitting; one flash of success, and then extinction, like a boy’s cracker on the pavement.  Not an elevated image, but closely resembling that which her alliance with Lord Ormont had been!

At the same time, no true lover of a woman advises her—­imploring is horrible treason—­to slip the symbolic circle of the law from her finger, and have in an instant the world for her enemy.  She must consent to be annihilated, and must have no feelings; particularly no mind.  The mind is the danger for her.  If she has a mind alive, she will certainly push for the position to exercise it, and run the risk of a classing with Nature’s created mates for reptile men.