quite a boy and he impressed me. I must have caught the
disposition from him."

"Well--go on with your accounting then," I said, assuming an air of
resignation.

"That's just it." Marlow fell into his stride at once. "That's just it.
Mere disappointed cupidity cannot account for the proceedings of the next
morning; proceedings which I shall not describe to you--but which I shall
tell you of presently, not as a matter of conjecture but of actual fact.
Meantime returning to that evening altercation in deadened tones within
the private apartment of Miss de Barral's governess, what if I were to
tell you that disappointment had most likely made them touchy with each
other, but that perhaps the secret of his careless, railing behaviour,
was in the thought, springing up within him with an emphatic oath of
relief "Now there's nothing to prevent me from breaking away from that
old woman." And that the secret of her envenomed rage, not against this
miserable and attractive wretch, but against fate, accident and the whole
course of human life, concentrating its venom on de Barral and including
the innocent girl herself, was in the thought, in the fear crying within
her "Now I have nothing to hold him with . . . "

I couldn't refuse Marlow the tribute of a prolonged whistle "Phew! So
you suppose that . . . "

He waved his hand impatiently.

"I don't suppose. It was so. And anyhow why shouldn't you accept the
supposition. Do you look upon governesses as creatures above suspicion
or necessarily of moral perfection? I suppose their hearts would not
stand looking into much better than other people's. Why shouldn't a
governess have passions, all the passions, even that of libertinage, and
even ungovernable passions; yet suppressed by the very same means which
keep the rest of us in order: early training--necessity--circumstances--fear
of consequences; till there comes an age, a time when the restraint of
years becomes intolerable--and infatuation irresistible . . . "

"But if infatuation--quite possible I admit," I argued, "how do you
account for the nature of the conspiracy."

"You expect a cogency of conduct not usual in women," said Marlow. "The
subterfuges of a menaced passion are not to be fathomed. You think it is
going on the way it looks, whereas it is capable, for its own ends, of
walking backwards into a precipice.

When one once acknowledges that she was not a common woman, then all this
is easily underst