its very nature, admits of no obedience.
The compliance with a request must be voluntary, and she would not
send for Mrs Marsham, except upon compulsion. Had not she also made
a request to him, and had not he refused it? It was his prerogative,
undoubtedly, to command; but in that matter of requests she had a
right to expect that her voice should be as potent as his own. She
wrote a line, therefore, to Alice before she went to bed, begging her
cousin to come to her early on the following day, so that they might
go out together, and then afterwards dine in company with Mr Bott.

"I know that will be an inducement to you," Lady Glencora said,
"because your generous heart will feel of what service you may be to
me. Nobody else will be here,--unless, indeed, Mrs Marsham should be
asked, unknown to myself."

Then she sat herself down to think,--to think especially about the
cruelty of husbands. She had been told over and over again, in the
days before her marriage, that Burgo would ill-use her if he became
her husband. The Marquis of Auld Reekie had gone so far as to suggest
that Burgo might probably beat her. But what hard treatment, even
what beating, could be so unendurable as this total want of sympathy,
as this deadness in life, which her present lot entailed upon her? As
for that matter of beating, she ridiculed the idea in her very soul.
She sat smiling at the absurdity of the thing as she thought of the
beauty of Burgo's eyes, of the softness of his touch, of the loving,
almost worshipping, tones of his voice. Would it not even be better
to be beaten by him than to have politics explained to her at one
o'clock at night by such a husband as Plantagenet Palliser? The
British Constitution, indeed! Had she married Burgo they would have
been in sunny Italy, and he would have told her some other tale than
that as they sat together under the pale moonlight. She had a little
water-coloured drawing called Raphael and Fornarina, and she was
infantine enough to tell herself that the so-called Raphael was like
her Burgo--no, not her Burgo, but the Burgo that was not hers. At any
rate, all the romance of the picture she might have enjoyed had they
allowed her to dispose as she had wished of her own hand. She might
have sat in marble balconies, while the vines clustered over her
head, and he would have been at her knee, hardly speaking to her, but
making his presence felt by the halo of its divinity. He would have
called upon he