is beyond the capacity of man.

He had now, he felt sure, a clear comprehension of Lady Sophia. Their
short interview at Burlington House had been illuminating. She was a
typical example of the Adam's-rib woman; that is, of the woman who,
intensely, almost exaggeratedly feminine, can live in any fullness only
through another, and that other a man. Through Mr. Harding Lady Sophia
had hitherto lived, and had doubtless, in her view, triumphed. Obviously
a woman not free from a nervous vanity, and a woman of hungry ambition,
her vanity and ambition had been fed by his growing notoriety, his
increasing success and influence. The rib had thrilled with the body to
which it belonged.

But that time of happy emotion, of admiration, of keen looking forward,
was the property of the past. Lawn sleeves, purple, perhaps,--for who
is more hopeful than this type of woman in the golden moments of
life?--perhaps even an archiepiscopal throne faded from before the eyes
they had gladdened--the eyes of faith in a man.

And a different woman was beginning to appear--a woman who might be as
critical as she had formerly been admiring, a woman capable of becoming
embittered.

On the Sunday of Malling's visit to Onslow Gardens, Mr. Harding's failure
in the pulpit had waked up in his wife eager sympathy and eager spite,
the one directed toward the man who had failed, the other toward the man
who, as Malling felt sure, had caused the failure.

In Burlington House that woman, whom men with every reason adore, had
given place to another less favorable toward him who had been her hero.