There is no food so satisfying to the vanity of a middle-aged woman as
the admiration and desire of young men. Lady Sellingworth longed
for, and sought for, that food, but not without inward shame, and
occasionally something that approached inward horror. For she had, and
never was able to lose, a sense of what was due not merely to herself
but to her better self. Here the woman of the blood was at grips with
the woman of the grey matter. And the imp enthroned somewhere within her
watched, marked, remembered, condemned.

That imp began to persecute Lady Sellingworth. She would have slain him
if she could, for he was horribly critical, and remained cold through
all her intensities. In Paris he had often been useful to her, for irony
is appreciated in Paris, and he was strongly ironical. Often she felt as
if he had eyes fixed upon her sardonically, when she was giving way to
the woman in her blood. In Paris it had been different. For there, at
any rate in all the earlier years, he had been criticizing and laughing
at others. Now his attention was always on her. There were moments when
she could almost hear his ugly, whispering voice telling her all he
thought about her, about her appearance, her conduct, her future, about
her connexions with others now, about the loneliness that was coming
upon her. She saw many other women who were evidently content in, and
unconscious of, their follies. Why was she not like them? Why had she
been singled out for this persecution of the brain. It is terrible to
have a brain which mocks at you instead of happily mocking at others.
And that was her case. Later she was to understand herself better; she
was to understand that her secret diffidence was connected with the imp,
was the imp's child in her as it were; later, too, she was to learn that
the imp was working for her eventual salvation, in the moral sense.

But she had not yet reached that turning in the path of her life.