ou ask me, how, wherefore,
for what reason? I will answer you: Why, by chance! By the merest
chance, as things do happen, lucky and unlucky, terrible or tender,
important or unimportant; and even things which are neither, things so
completely neutral in character that you would wonder why they do happen
at all if you didn't know that they, too, carry in their insignificance
the seeds of further incalculable chances.

Of course, all the chances were that de Barral should have fallen upon a
perfectly harmless, naive, usual, inefficient specimen of respectable
governess for his daughter; or on a commonplace silly adventuress who
would have tried, say, to marry him or work some other sort of common
mischief in a small way. Or again he might have chanced on a model of
all the virtues, or the repository of all knowledge, or anything equally
harmless, conventional, and middle class. All calculations were in his
favour; but, chance being incalculable, he fell upon an individuality
whom it is much easier to define by opprobrious names than to classify in
a calm and scientific spirit--but an individuality certainly, and a
temperament as well. Rare? No. There is a certain amount of what I
would politely call unscrupulousness in all of us. Think for instance of
the excellent Mrs. Fyne, who herself, and in the bosom of her family,
resembled a governess of a conventional type. Only, her mental excesses
were theoretical, hedged in by so much humane feeling and conventional
reserves, that they amounted to no more than mere libertinage of thought;
whereas the other woman, the governess of Flora de Barral, was, as you
may have noticed, severely practical--terribly practical. No! Hers was
not a rare temperament, except in its fierce resentment of repression; a
feeling which like genius or lunacy is apt to drive people into sudden
irrelevancy. Hers was feminine irrelevancy. A male genius, a male
ruffian, or even a male lunatic, would not have behaved exactly as she
did behave. There is a softness in masculine nature, even the most
brutal, which acts as a check.

While the girl slept those two, the woman of forty, an age in itself
terrible, and that hopeless young "wrong 'un" of twenty-three (also well
connected I believe) had some sort of subdued row in the cleared rooms:
wardrobes open, drawers half pulled out and empty, trunks locked and
strapped, furniture in idle disarray, and not so much as a single scrap
of paper left