that personage. I can only describe the affair, naturally, from the
outside, and heaven forbid indeed that I should try too closely to,
reconstruct the possible strange intercourse of these good friends at
home.

My anecdote, however, would lose half the point it may have to show were
I to omit all mention of the consummate turn her ladyship appeared
gradually to have found herself able to give her deportment. She had
made it impossible I should myself bring up our old, our original
question, but there was real distinction in her manner of now accepting
certain other possibilities. Let me do her that justice; her effort at
magnanimity must have been immense. There couldn't fail of course to be
ways in which poor Mrs. Brash paid for it. How much she had to pay we
were in fact soon enough to see; and it's my intimate conviction that, as
a climax, her life at last was the price. But while she lived at
least--and it was with an intensity, for those wondrous weeks, of which
she had never dreamed--Lady Beldonald herself faced the music. This is
what I mean by the possibilities, by the sharp actualities indeed, that
she accepted. She took our friend out, she showed her at home, never
attempted to hide or to betray her, played her no trick whatever so long
as the ordeal lasted. She drank deep, on her side too, of the cup--the
cup that for her own lips could only be bitterness. There was, I think,
scarce a special success of her companion's at which she wasn't
personally present. Mrs. Munden's theory of the silence in which all
this would be muffled for them was none the less, and in abundance,
confirmed by our observations. The whole thing was to be the death of
one or the other of them, but they never spoke of it at tea. I remember
even that Nina went so far as to say to me once, looking me full in the
eyes, quite sublimely, "I've made out what you mean--she _is_ a picture."
The beauty of this moreover was that, as I'm persuaded, she hadn't really