above suspicion
or necessarily of moral perfection? I suppose their hearts would not
stand looking into much better than other people's. Why shouldn't a
governess have passions, all the passions, even that of libertinage, and
even ungovernable passions; yet suppressed by the very same means which
keep the rest of us in order: early training--necessity--circumstances--
fear of consequences; till there comes an age, a time when the restraint
of years becomes intolerable--and infatuation irresistible..."

"But if infatuation--quite possible I admit," I argued, "how do you
account for the nature of the conspiracy."

"You expect a cogency of conduct not usual in women," said Marlow. "The
subterfuges of a menaced passion are not to be fathomed. You think it
is going on the way it looks, whereas it is capable, for its own ends,
of walking backwards into a precipice."

When one once acknowledges that she was not a common woman, then all
this is easily understood. She was abominable but she was not common.
She had suffered in her life not from its constant inferiority but from
constant self-repression. A common woman finding herself placed in a
commanding position might have formed the design to become the second
Mrs de Barral. Which would have been impracticable. De Barral would
not have known what to do with a wife. But even if by some impossible
chance he had made advances, this governess would have repulsed him with
scorn. She had treated him always as an inferior being with an assured,
distant politeness. In her composed, schooled manner she despised and
disliked both father and daughter exceedingly. I have a notion that she
had always disliked intensely all her charges including the two ducal
(if they were ducal) little girls with whom she had dazzled de Barral.
What an odious, ungratified existence it must have been for a woman as
avid of all the sensuous emotions which life can give as most of her
betters.

She had seen her youth vanish, her freshness disappear, her hopes die,
and now she felt her flaming middle-age slipping away from her. No
wonder that with her admirably dressed, abundant hair, thickly sprinkled
with white threads and adding to her elegant aspect the piquant
distinction of a powdered coiffure--no wonder, I say, that she clung
desperately to her last infatuation for that graceless young scamp, even
to the extent of hatching for him that amazing plot. He was not so far
gone in degradati