“Oh, it’s a story all compact of ‘buts,’” Peter threw out laughing.

She let the remark pass her—­she had settled upon her question.

“But how could he endure such a situation?” she asked.  “How could he sit still under it?  Did n’t he try in any way—­did n’t he make any effort at all—­to—­to find her out—­to discover who she was—­to get introduced to her?  I should think he could never have rested—­I should think he would have moved heaven and earth.”

“What could he do?  Tell me a single thing he could have done,” said Peter.  “Society has made no provision for a case like his.  It ’s absurd—­but there it is.  You see a woman somewhere; you long to make her acquaintance; and there’s no natural bar to your doing so—­you ’re a presentable man she’s what they call a lady—­you’re both, more or less, of the same monde.  Yet there ’s positively no way known by which you can contrive it—­unless chance, mere fortuitous chance, just happens to drop a common acquaintance between you, at the right time and place.  Chance, in Wildmay’s case, happened to drop all the common acquaintances they may possibly have had at a deplorable distance.  He was alone on each of the occasions when he saw her.  There was no one he could ask to introduce him; there was no one he could apply to for information concerning her.  He could n’t very well follow her carriage through the streets—­dog her to her lair, like a detective.  Well—­what then?”

The Duchessa was playing with her fan again.

“No,” she agreed; “I suppose it was hopeless.  But it seems rather hard on the poor man—­rather baffling and tantalising.”

“The poor man thought it so, to be sure,” said Peter; “he fretted and fumed a good deal, and kicked against the pricks.  Here, there, now, anon, he would enjoy his brief little vision of her—­then she would vanish into the deep inane.  So, in the end—­he had to take it out in something—­he took it out in writing a book about her.  He propped up a mental portrait of her on his desk before him, and translated it into the character of Pauline.  In that way he was able to spend long delightful hours alone with her every day, in a kind of metaphysical intimacy.  He had never heard her voice—­but now he heard it as often as Pauline opened her lips.  He owned her —­he possessed her—­she lived under his roof—­she was always waiting for him in his study.  She is real to you?  She was inexpressibly, miraculously real to him.  He saw her, knew her, felt her, realised her, in every detail of her mind, her soul, her person—­down to the very intonations of her speech—­down to the veins in her hands, the rings on her fingers—­down to her very furs and laces, the frou-frou of her skirts, the scent upon her pocket-handkerchief.  He had numbered the hairs of her head, almost.”

Again the Duchessa mused for a while in silence, opening and shutting her fan, and gazing into its opals.