“Commoners, if you like; but established since the Conquest.  That is, we trace the pedigree.  And to be treated, even by a great nobleman, as if we were stuff picked up out of the ditch!  I declare, there are times when I sit and think and boil.  Is it chivalrous, is it generous—­is it, I say, decent—­is it what Alfred would have called a fair fulfilment of a pact, for your wedded husband—?  You may close my mouth!  But he pretends to be chivalrous and generous, and he has won a queen any wealthy gentleman in England—­I know of one, if not two—­would be proud to have beside him in equal state; and what is he to her?  He is an extinguisher.  Or is it the very meanest miserliness, that he may keep you all to himself?  There we are again!  I say he is an unreadable sphinx.”

Aminta had rung the bell for her maid.  Mrs. Pagnell could be counted on for drawing in her tongue when the domestics were near.

A languor past delivery in sighs was on the young woman’s breast.  She could have heard without a regret that the heart was to cease beating.  Had it been downright misery she would have looked about her with less of her exanimate glassiness.  The unhappy have a form of life:  until they are worn out, they feel keenly.  She felt nothing.  The blow to her pride of station and womanhood struck on numbed sensations.  She could complain that the blow was not heavier.

A letter lying in her jewel-box called her to read it, for the chance of some slight stir.  The contents were known.  The signature of Adolphus Morsfield had a new meaning for her eyes, and dashed her at her husband in a spasm of revolt and wrath against the man exposing her to these letters, which a motion of her hand could turn to blood, and abstention from any sign maintained in a Satanic whisper, saying, “Here lies one way of solving the riddle.”  It was her husband who drove her to look that way.

The look was transient, and the wrath:  she could not burn.  A small portion of contempt lodged in her mind to shadow husbands precipitating women on their armoury for a taste of vengeance.  Women can always be revenged—­so speedily, so completely:  they have but to dip.  Husbands driving wives to taste their power execrate the creature for her fall deep downward.  They are forgetful of causes.

Does it matter?  Aminta’s languor asked.  The letter had not won a reply.  Thought of the briefest of replies was a mountain of effort, and she moaned at her nervelessness in body and mind.  To reply, to reproach the man, to be flame—­an image of herself under the form she desired—­gave her a momentary false energy, wherein the daring of the man, whose life was at a loss for the writing of this letter, hung lighted.  She had therewith a sharp vision of his features, repellent in correctness, Greek in lines, with close eyes, hollow temples, pressed lips—­a face indicating the man who can fling himself on a die.  She had heard tales of women and the man.  Some had loved him, report said.  Here were words to say that he loved her.  They might, poor man, be true.  Otherwise she had never been loved.