the undertakings of women, he mused, were piteous, not only because
women were unequal to the struggle at the best, but because they were
hampered always with themselves, with their sex, their femininity, and
the necessity of getting it out of the way before they could really
begin to fight. Whatever they attempted it must be in relation to the
man's world in which livings were made; but the immemorial conditions
were almost wholly unchanged. A woman approached this world as a woman,
with the inborn instinct of tempting it as a woman, to win it to love
her and make her a wife and mother; and although she might stoically
overcome the temptation at last, it might recur at any moment and
overcome her. This was perpetually weakening and imperilling her, and
she must feel it at the encounter with each man she met. She must feel
the tacit and even unconscious irony of his attitude towards her in her
enterprise, and the finer her make the crueller and the more humiliating
and disheartening this must be.

Of course, this Miss Shirley felt Verrian's irony, which he had guarded
from any expression with genuine compassion for her. She must feel that
to his knowledge of life she and her experiment had an absurdity which
would not pass, whatever their success might be. If she meant business,
and business only, they ought to have met as two men would have met, but
he knew that they had not done so, and she must have known it. All that
was plain sailing enough, but beyond this lay a sea of conjecture in
which he found himself without helm or compass. Why, should she have
acted a fib about his being an actor, and why, after the end, should
she have added an end, in which she returned to own that she had been
fibbing? For that was what it came to; and though Verrian tasted a
delicious pleasure in the womanish feat by which she overcame her
womanishness, he could not puzzle out her motive. He was not sure that
he wished to puzzle it out. To remain with illimitable guesses at his
choice was more agreeable, for the present at least, and he was not
aware of having lapsed from them when he woke so late as to be one of
the breakfasters whose plates were kept for them after the others were
gone.

XVI.

It was the first time that Verrian had come down late, and it was his
novel experience to find himself in charge of Mrs. Stager at breakfast,
instead of the butler and the butler's man, who had hitherto served him
at the earlier hour. T