divorced. You've got a husband. I won't be guilty of the bad taste of
discussing him. He's a good fellow enough, but he never thinks about you
from the time the Exchange opens in the morning until he gets home at
night and wants his dinner. You don't love him--it would be a miracle if
a woman with any spirit did. He hasn't any more of an idea of what he
possesses by legal right than the man I discovered driving in a cart one
of the best hunters I ever had in my stables. To say that he doesn't
appreciate you is a ludicrous understatement. Any woman would have done
for him."

"Please don't!" she implored him. "Please don't!"

But for the moment she knew that she was powerless, carried along like a
chip on the crest of his passion.

"I don't pretend to say how it is, or why it is," he went on, paying no
heed to her protests. "I suppose there's one woman for every man in the
world--though I didn't use to think so. I always had another idea of
woman before I met you. I've thought I was in love with 'em, but now I
understand it was only--something else. I say, I don't know what it is in
you that makes me feel differently. I can't analyze it, and I don't want
to. You're not perfect, by a good deal, and God knows I'm not. You're
ambitious, but if you weren't, you'd be humdrum--yet there's no pitiful
artifice in you as in other women that any idiot can see through. And it
would have paralyzed forever any ordinary woman to have married Howard
Spence."

A new method of wooing, surely, and evidently peculiar to Trixton Brent.
Honora, in the prey of emotions which he had aroused in spite of her,
needless to say did not, at that moment, perceive the humour in it. His