“You couldn’t lay it over my back,” he said placidly, “because I’m sitting down; but I’m not insulting you in that way. I dare say you’d have been perfectly faithful to Dudley--faithful and probably furiously jealous too; but you wouldn’t have made a man of him. He’d have lived a sort of doll’s life under your petticoats. You’d probably have made him keep a racing-stable, and drop a pot of money at Monte Carlo, and drop another pot over bridge, and you’d have got him involved all round, and he’d have dragged along somehow whilst you carried on as women to-day do carry on. That’s the sort of thing it would have been. Mind! I’m not preaching to you. If people like to live that sort of life, that’s their business. It takes all sorts to make a world, but ...” Lady Hudson suddenly put her hand upon his knee. “I’ve always believed, Robert Grimshaw,” she said--“I always _did_ believe that it was you who made Dudley break off from me. You’re the chap, aren’t you, that made him look after his estates, and become a model landowner, and nurse the county to give him a seat? All that sort of thing.” “I’m the chap who did look after his estates,” Robert Grimshaw said. “I’m not saying that I wouldn’t have influenced Dudley Leicester against you; I didn’t, as a matter of fact. I never said a word against you in my life; but it’s possible, of course, that my taking up his land business, out of sheer meddlesomeness, may have influenced him against you. Dudley’s got more in him than appears on the surface. Or, at least, he can stick straight in a way if he is put into it, and just about that time Dudley got it into his head that he had a duty to his county and his country, and so on ...” Etta Stackpole’s fingers moved convulsively. “Oh, my man,” she said, “what the deuce’s business was it of yours? Why couldn’t you have let him alone?” “I’m telling you the worst of what I did to you,” Robert Grimshaw said. “I didn’t take Dudley Leicester from you. I’ve never said a word against you, but I probably kept him from coming back to you once he had thrown you over. I don’t mean to say that I did it by persuasions; he was dogged enough not to come back, but I dare say he would have returned to you if he hadn’t had his mind occupied--if I hadn’t occupied his mind with barn-roofs and rents and field-draining, and the healthy sort of things that keep a man off women.” “Oh, you devil!” Etta Hudson said. “Who’d have thought you had it in you? Where do you get it from? You look just like any other Park loafer.”