breaking my heart. That is what it works out at.
She need not have troubled.

But, having no priests to talk to, she had to talk to someone, and
as Florence insisted on talking to her, she talked back, in short,
explosive sentences, like one of the damned. Precisely like one of the
damned. Well, if a pretty period in hell on this earth can spare her
any period of pain in Eternity--where there are not any periods--I guess
Leonora will escape hell fire.

Her conversations with Florence would be like this. Florence would
happen in on her, whilst she was doing her wonderful hair, with a
proposition from Edward, who seems about that time to have conceived the
naive idea that he might become a polygamist. I daresay it was Florence
who put it into his head. Anyhow, I am not responsible for the oddities
of the human psychology. But it certainly appears that at about that
date Edward cared more for Leonora than he had ever done before--or,
at any rate, for a long time. And, if Leonora had been a person to play
cards and if she had played her cards well, and if she had had no sense
of shame and so on, she might then have shared Edward with Florence
until the time came for jerking that poor cuckoo out of the nest. Well,
Florence would come to Leonora with some such proposition. I do not mean
to say that she put it baldly, like that. She stood out that she was not
Edward's mistress until Leonora said that she had seen Edward coming out
of her room at an advanced hour of the night. That checked Florence
a bit; but she fell back upon her "heart" and stuck out that she had
merely been conversing with Edward in order to bring him to a better
frame of mind. Florence had, of course, to stick to that story; for even
Florence would not have had the face to implore Leonora to grant her
favours to Edward if she had admitted that she was Edward's mistress.
That could not be done. At the same time Florence had such a pressing
desire to talk about something. There would have been nothing else to
talk about but a rapprochement between that estranged pair. So Florence
would go on babbling and Leonora would go on brushing her hair. And then
Leonora would say suddenly something like:

"I should think myself defiled if Edward touched me now that he has
touched you."

That would discourage Florence a bit; but after a week or so, on another
morning she would have another try.

And even in other things Leonora deteriorated. She had promised Edward