she had let Branshaw for seven years at a thousand a year. She
sold two Vandykes and a little silver for eleven thousand pounds and
she raised, on mortgage, twenty-nine thousand. That went to Edward's
money-lending friends in Monte Carlo. So she had to get the twenty-nine
thousand back, for she did not regard the Vandykes and the silver
as things she would have to replace. They were just frills to the
Ashburnham vanity. Edward cried for two days over the disappearance of
his ancestors and then she wished she had not done it; but it did not
teach her anything and it lessened such esteem as she had for him. She
did not also understand that to let Branshaw affected him with a feeling
of physical soiling--that it was almost as bad for him as if a woman
belonging to him had become a prostitute. That was how it did affect
him; but I dare say she felt just as bad about the Spanish dancer.

So she went at it. They were eight years in India, and during the whole
of that time she insisted that they must be self-supporting--they had
to live on his Captain's pay, plus the extra allowance for being at the
front. She gave him the five hundred a year for Ashburnham frills, as
she called it to herself--and she considered she was doing him very
well.

Indeed, in a way, she did him very well--but it was not his way. She was
always buying him expensive things which, as it were, she took off her
own back. I have, for instance, spoken of Edward's leather cases. Well,
they were not Edward's at all; they were Leonora's manifestations. He
liked to be clean, but he preferred, as it were, to be threadbare. She
never understood that, and all that pigskin was her idea of a reward to
him for putting her up to a little speculation by which she made eleven
hundred pounds. She did, herself, the threadbare business. When they
went up to a place called Simla, where, as I understand, it is cool in
the summer and very social--when they went up to Simla for their healths
it was she who had him prancing around, as we should say in the United
States, on a thousand-dollar horse with the gladdest of glad rags all
over him. She herself used to go into "retreat". I believe that was very
good for her health and it was also very inexpensive.

It was probably also very good for Edward's health, because he pranced
about mostly with Mrs Basil, who was a nice woman and very, very kind to
him. I suppose she was his mistress, but I never heard it from Edward,
of cours