to meet dear Hugo’s old friends!  And Miss Wade, too; how delightful!  You look so well, Miss Wade!  Oh, you’re both at St. Nathaniel’s now, aren’t you?  So you can come together.  What a privilege for you, Dr. Cumberledge, to have such a clever assistant—­or, rather, fellow-worker.  It must be a great life, yours, Miss Wade; such a sphere of usefulness!  If we can only feel we are doing good—­that is the main matter.  For my own part, I like to be mixed up with every good work that’s going on in my neighbourhood.  I’m the soup-kitchen, you know, and I’m visitor at the workhouse; and I’m the Dorcas Society, and the Mutual Improvement Class; and the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and to Children, and I’m sure I don’t know how much else; so that, what with all that, and what with dear Hugo and the darling children”—­ she glanced affectionately at Maisie and Ettie, who sat bolt upright, very mute and still, in their best and stiffest frocks, on two stools in the corner—­“I can hardly find time for my social duties.”

“Oh, dear Mrs. Le Geyt,” one of her visitors said with effusion, from beneath a nodding bonnet—­she was the wife of a rural dean from Staffordshire—­“Everybody is agreed that your social duties are performed to a marvel.  They are the envy of Kensington.  We all of us wonder, indeed, how one woman can find time for all of it!”

Our hostess looked pleased.  “Well, yes,” she answered, gazing down at her fawn-coloured dress with a half-suppressed smile of self-satisfaction, “I flatter myself I can get through about as much work in a day as anybody!” Her eye wandered round her rooms with a modest air of placid self-approval which was almost comic.  Everything in them was as well-kept and as well-polished as good servants, thoroughly drilled, could make it.  Not a stain or a speck anywhere.  A miracle of neatness.  Indeed, when I carelessly drew the Norwegian dagger from its scabbard, as we waited for lunch, and found that it stuck in the sheath, I almost started to discover that rust could intrude into that orderly household.

I recollected then how Hilda Wade had pointed out to me during those six months at St. Nathaniel’s that the women whose husbands assaulted them were almost always “notable housewives,” as they say in America—­good souls who prided themselves not a little on their skill in management.  They were capable, practical mothers of families, with a boundless belief in themselves, a sincere desire to do their duty, as far as they understood it, and a habit of impressing their virtues upon others which was quite beyond all human endurance.  Placidity was their note; provoking placidity.  I felt sure it must have been of a woman of this type that the famous phrase was coined—­“Elle a toutes les vertus—­et elle est insupportable.”

“Clara, dear,” the husband said, “shall we go in to lunch?”

“You dear, stupid boy!  Are we not all waiting for you to give your arm to Lady Maitland?”