whose prestige had never been questioned; who, from long immunity, and a
certain clear-cut matter-of-factness, bred by the habit of command,
had indeed lost the power of perceiving that her prestige ever could
be questioned. Her knowledge of her own mind was no ordinary piece of
learning, had not, in fact, been learned at all, but sprang full-fledged
from an active dominating temperament. Fortified by the necessity,
common to her class, of knowing thoroughly the more patent side of
public affairs; armoured by the tradition of a culture demanded by
leadership; inspired by ideas, but always the same ideas; owning no
master, but in servitude to her own custom of leading, she had a
mind, formidable as the two-edged swords wielded by her ancestors
the Fitz-Harolds, at Agincourt or Poitiers--a mind which had ever
instinctively rejected that inner knowledge of herself or of the
selves of others; produced by those foolish practices of introspection,
contemplation, and understanding, so deleterious to authority. If Lord
Valleys was the body of the aristocratic machine, Lady Casterley was the
steel spring inside it. All her life studiously unaffected and simple in
attire; of plain and frugal habit; an early riser; working at
something or other from morning till night, and as little worn-out at
seventy-eight as most women of fifty, she had only one weak spot--and
that was her strength--blindness as to the nature and size of her place
in the scheme of things. She was a type, a force.

Wonderfully well she went with the room in which they were dining, whose
grey walls, surmounted by a deep frieze painted somewhat in the style
of Fragonard, contained many nymphs and roses now rather dim; with the
furniture, too, which had a look of having survived into times not its
own. On the tables were no flowers, save five lilies in an old silver
chalice; and on the wall over the great sideboard a portrait of the late
Lord Casterley.