. There is not a
servant in the house with whom she would dare such a manner. Did I
resent it?"

"You behaved with great forbearance. I watched you with admiration."

"Ah, _forbearance!_ I fear you don't understand one of the strangest
elements in the whole case. I am _afraid_ of Lady Henry, mortally
afraid! When she speaks to me I feel like a child who puts up its hands
to ward off a blow. My instinct is not merely to submit, but to grovel.
When you have had the youth that I had, when you have existed, learned,
amused yourself on sufferance, when you have had somehow to maintain
yourself among girls who had family, friends, money, name, while you--"

Her voice stopped, resolutely silenced before it broke. Sir Wilfrid
uncomfortably felt that he had no sympathy to produce worthy of the
claim that her whole personality seemed to make upon it. But she
recovered herself immediately.

"Now I think I had better give you an outline of the last six months,"
she said, turning to him. "Of course it is my side of the matter. But
you have heard Lady Henry's."

And with great composure she laid before him an outline of the chief
quarrels and grievances which had embittered the life of the Bruton
Street house during the period she had named. It was a wretched story,
and she clearly told it with repugnance and disgust. There was in her
tone a note of offended personal delicacy, as of one bemired against
her will.

Evidently, Lady Henry was hardly to be defended. The thing had been
"odious," indeed. Two women of great ability and different ages, shut up
together and jarring at every point, the elder furiously jealous and
exasperated by what seemed to her the affront offered to her high rank
and her past ascendency by the social success of her dependant, the
other defending herself, first by the arts of flattery and submission,
and then, when these proved hopeless, by a social skill that at least
wore many of the aspects of intrigue--these were the essential elements
of the situation; and, as her narrative proceeded, Sir Wilfrid admitted
to himself that it was hard to see any way out of it. As to his own
sympathies, he did not know what to make of them.

"No. I have been only too yielding," said Mademoiselle Le Breton,
sorely, when her tale was done. "I am ashamed when I look back on what I
have borne. But now it has gone too far, and something must be done. If
I go, frankly, Lady Henry will suffer."

Sir Wilfrid looked at his