she withdrew, and the duchess closed the door. She ran
a bolt in it immediately.

'I'm too tired to know anything I'm doing,' she said to herself,
and stood with shut eyes to hug certain thoughts which set her bosom
heaving.

There was the bed, there was the clock. She had the option of lying down
and floating quietly into the day, all peril past. It seemed sweet for a
minute. But it soon seemed an old, a worn, an end-of-autumn life, chill,
without aim, like a something that was hungry and toothless. The bed
proposing innocent sleep repelled her and drove her to the clock. The
clock was awful: the hand at the hour, the finger following the minute,
commanded her to stir actively, and drove her to gentle meditations on
the bed. She lay down dressed, after setting her light beside the clock,
that she might see it at will, and considering it necessary for the bed
to appear to have been lain on. Considering also that she ought to be
heard moving about in the process of undressing, she rose from the bed
to make sure of her reading of the guilty clock. An hour and twenty
minutes! she had no more time than that: and it was not enough for her
various preparations, though it was true that her maid had packed and
taken a box of the things chiefly needful; but the duchess had to change
her shoes and her dress, and run at bo-peep with the changes of
her mind, a sedative preface to any fatal step among women of her
complexion, for so they invite indecision to exhaust their scruples, and
they let the blood have its way. Having so short a space of time, she
thought the matter decided, and with some relief she flung despairing on
the bed, and lay down for good with her duke. In a little while her head
was at work reviewing him sternly, estimating him not less accurately
than the male moralist charitable to her sex would do. She quitted the
bed, with a spring to escape her imagined lord; and as if she had
felt him to be there, she lay down no more. A quiet life like that was
flatter to her idea than a handsomely bound big book without any print
on the pages, and without a picture. Her contemplation of it, contrasted
with the life waved to her view by the timepiece, set her whole system
rageing; she burned to fly. Providently, nevertheless, she thumped a
pillow, and threw the bedclothes into proper disorder, to inform the
world that her limbs had warmed them, and that all had been impulse with
her. She then proceeded to disrobe, murmurin