‘Do, my darling.’

‘Victor, you did not tell me of Dartrey’s wife.’

’There again!  They all get released!  Yes, Dartrey!  Dartrey has his luck too.’

She closed her eyes, with the desire to be asleep.

‘You should have told me, dear.’

’Well, my love!  Well—­poor Dartrey!  I fancy I hadn’t a confirmation of the news.  I remember a horrible fit of envy on hearing the hint:  not much more than a hint:  serious illness, was it?—­or expected event.  Hardly worth while to trouble my dear soul, till certain.  Anything about wives, forces me to think of myself—­my better self!’

‘I had to hear of it first from Mrs. Blathenoy.’

’You’ve heard of duels in dark rooms:—­that was the case between Blathenoy and me last night for an hour.’

She feigned somnolent fatigue over her feverish weariness of heart.  He kissed her on the forehead.

Her spell-bound intention to speak of Dudley Sowerby to him, was broken by the sounding of the hall-door, thirty minutes later.  She had lain in a trance.

Life surged to her with the thought, that she could decide and take her step.  Many were the years back since she had taken a step; less independently then than now; unregretted, if fatal.  Her brain was heated for the larger view of things and the swifter summing of them.  It could put the man at a remove from her and say, that she had lived with him and suffered intensely.  It gathered him to her breast rejoicing in their union:  the sharper the scourge, the keener the exultation.  But she had one reproach to deafen and beat down.  This did not come on her from the world:  she and the world were too much foot to foot on the antagonist’s line, for her to listen humbly.  It came of her quick summary survey of him, which was unnoticed by the woman’s present fiery mind as being new or strange in any way:  simply it was a fact she now read; and it directed her to reproach herself for an abasement beneath his leadership, a blind subserviency and surrender of her faculties to his greater powers, such as no soul of a breathing body should yield to man:  not to the highest, not to the Titan, not to the most Godlike of men.  Under cloak, they demand it.  They demand their bane.

And Victor! . . .  She had seen into him.

The reproach on her was, that she, in her worship, had been slave, not helper.  Scarcely was she irreproachable in the character of slave.  If it had been utter slave! she phrased the words, for a further reproach.  She remembered having at times murmured, dissented.  And it would have been a desperate proud thought to comfort a slave, that never once had she known even a secret opposition to the will of her lord.

But she had:  she recalled instances.  Up they rose; up rose everything her mind ranged over, subsiding immediately when the service was done.  She had not conceived her beloved to be infallible, surest of guides in all earthly-matters.  Her intellect had sometimes protested.