nd a
feeling equally intense, but one that she hid from herself--a feeling of
respect for Edward's determination to keep himself, in this particular
affair, unspotted.

And the human heart is a very mysterious thing. It is impossible to say
that Leonora, in acting as she then did, was not filled with a sort of
hatred of Edward's final virtue. She wanted, I think, to despise him. He
was, she realized gone from her for good. Then let him suffer, let him
agonize; let him, if possible, break and go to that Hell that is the
abode of broken resolves. She might have taken a different line. It
would have been so easy to send the girl away to stay with some friends;
to have taken her away herself upon some pretext or other. That would
not have cured things but it would have been the decent line,... But, at
that date, poor Leonora was incapable of taking any line whatever.

She pitied Edward frightfully at one time--and then she acted along
the lines of pity; she loathed him at another and then she acted as her
loathing dictated. She gasped, as a person dying of tuberculosis gasps
for air. She craved madly for communication with some other human soul.
And the human soul that she selected was that of the girl.

Perhaps Nancy was the only person that she could have talked to. With
her necessity for reticences, with her coldness of manner, Leonora had
singularly few intimates. She had none at all, with the exception of
the Mrs Colonel Whelen, who had advised her about the affair with La
Dolciquita, and the one or two religious, who had guided her through
life. The Colonel's wife was at that time in Madeira; the religious she
now avoided. Her visitors' book had seven hundred names in it; there was
not a soul that she could speak to. She was Mrs Ashburnham of Branshaw
Teleragh.

She was the great Mrs Ashburnham of Branshaw and she lay all day upon
her bed in her marvellous, light, airy bedroom with the chintzes and
the Chippendale and the portraits of deceased Ashburnhams by Zoffany and
Zucchero. When there was a meet she would struggle up--supposing it were
within driving distance--and let Edward drive her and the girl to the
cross-roads or the country house. She would drive herself back alone;
Edward would ride off with the girl. Ride Leonora could not, that
season--her head was too bad. Each pace of her mare was an anguish.

But she drove with efficiency and precision; she smiled at the Gimmers
and Ffoulkes and the Hedley Seat