MRS. FARRANT. We may none of us think so. But there's our position ... bread
and butter and a certain satisfaction until ... Oh, Mamma, I wish I were
like you ... beyond all the passions of life.

LADY DAVENPORT. [_With great vitality._] I'm nothing of the sort. It's my
egoism's dead ... that's an intimation of mortality.

MRS. FARRANT. I accept the snub. But I wonder what I'm to do with myself for
the next thirty years.

FRANCES TREBELL. Help Lord Horsham to govern the country.

JULIA FARRANT _gives a little laugh and takes up the subject this
time._

MRS. FARRANT. Mamma ... how many people, do you think, believe that Cyril's
_grande passion_ for me takes that form?

LADY DAVENPORT. Everyone who knows Cyril and most people who know you.

MRS. FARRANT. Otherwise I seem to have fulfilled my mission in life. The
boys are old enough to go to school. George and I have become happily
unconscious of each other.

FRANCES TREBELL. [_With sudden energy of mind._] Till I was forty I never
realised the fact that most women must express themselves through men.

MRS. FARRANT. [_Looking at_ FRANCES _a little curiously._] Didn't your
instinct lead you to marry ... or did you fight against it?