dward into Florence's blue and uplifted
eyes, she knew that it had all gone. She knew that that gaze meant that
those two had had long conversations of an intimate kind--about their
likes and dislikes, about their natures, about their views of marriage.
She knew what it meant that she, when we all four walked out together,
had always been with me ten yards ahead of Florence and Edward. She did
not imagine that it had gone further than talks about their likes and
dislikes, about their natures or about marriage as an institution. But,
having watched Edward all her life, she knew that that laying on of
hands, that answering of gaze with gaze, meant that the thing was
unavoidable. Edward was such a serious person.

She knew that any attempt on her part to separate those two would be to
rivet on Edward an irrevocable passion; that, as I have before told
you, it was a trick of Edward's nature to believe that the seducing of a
woman gave her an irrevocable hold over him for life. And that touching
of hands, she knew, would give that woman an irrevocable claim--to be
seduced. And she so despised Florence that she would have preferred it
to be a parlour-maid. There are very decent parlour-maids.

And, suddenly, there came into her mind the conviction that Maisie
Maidan had a real passion for Edward; that this would break her
heart--and that she, Leonora, would be responsible for that. She went,
for the moment, mad. She clutched me by the wrist; she dragged me down
those stairs and across that whispering Rittersaal with the high painted
pillars, the high painted chimney-piece. I guess she did not go mad
enough.

She ought to have said:

"Your wife is a harlot who is going to be my husband's mistress.. ."
That might have done the trick. But, even in her madness, she was
afraid to go as far as that. She was afraid that, if she did, Edward and
Florence would make a bolt of it, and that, if they did that, she would
lose forever all chance of getting him back in the end. She acted very
badly to me.

Well, she was a tortured soul who put her Church before the interests of
a Philadelphia Quaker. That is all right--I daresay the Church of Rome
is the more important of the two.

A week after Maisie Maidan's death she was aware that Florence had
become Edward's mistress. She waited outside Florence's door and met
Edward as he came away. She said nothing and he only grunted. But I
guess he had a bad time.

Yes, the mental deteriora