?
He could merely estimate what she had done in the commonest, vulgarest
way. Yet who could truthfully charge her with having obtained her
divorce in order thereby to claim any fresh licence for herself? She
looked back now with a cool amazement on that sudden rush of passion
which had swept her into marriage, no less than the jealousy which had
led her to break with Roger. She was still capable of many kinds of
violence; but not, probably, of the violence of love. The influence of
sex and sense upon her had weakened; the influence of ambition had
increased. As in many women of Southern race, the period of hot blood
had passed into a period of intrigue and domination. Her wealth gave her
power, and for that power she lived.

Yes, she was personally desolate, but she had stood firm, and her reward
lay in the fact that she had gathered round her an army of dependents
and followers--women especially--to whom her money and her brains were
indispensable. There on the table lay the plans for a new Women's
College, on the broadest and most modern lines, to which she was soon to
devote a large sum of money. The walls should have been up by now but
for a quarrel with her secretary, who had become much too independent,
and had had to be peremptorily dismissed at a moment's notice. But the
plan was a noble one, approved by the highest authorities; and Daphne,
looking to posterity, anticipated the recognition that she herself might
never live to see. For the rest she had given herself--with
reservations--to the Feminist movement. It was not in her nature to give
herself wholly to anything; and she was instinctively critical of people
who professed to be her leaders, and programmes to which she was
expected to subscribe. Wholehearted devotion, which, as she rightly
said, meant blind devotion, had never been her line; and she had been on
one or two occasions offensively outspoken on the subject of certain
leading persons in the movement. She was not, therefore, popular with
her party, and did not care to be; her pride of money held her apart
from the rank and file, the college girls, and typists, and journalists
who filled the Feminist meetings, and often made themselves, in her
eyes, supremely ridiculous, because of what she considered their silly
provinciality and lack of knowledge of the world.

Yet, of course, she was a "Feminist"--and particularly associated with
those persons in the suffrage camp who stood for broad views on m