She came to the end of the life of Mme. de Montespan as imagined by the author, and closed the book, the better to reflect upon it. She sighed; she was disturbed by dim longings for an existence of this sort. She was full of dissatisfaction and preposterous ambitions. She was so immersed in the scenes of court life and in the pictures her imagination created that it was almost a shock to see Mr. Eddie sitting there in front of her, still working. She stared at him thoughtfully. A nice-looking boy--perhaps something more than that. His face was boyish, but in no way weak; the features were all good, fine, firm, regular. She fancied--still dreaming of what she had been reading--that he looked like a young prince, that there was something in his brow, in his presence, that was noble. Her glance wandered round his room. It was austere, handsome, immaculately neat. She liked it; it was manly. Her roving attention had distracted Mr. Eddie. He looked up, frowned, and leaned back in his chair. "Well?" he asked. "It’s a nice book. I like it." "That’s right. I’m very glad. Take it with you and finish it. It’ll do you good." "How can it?" He ran his fingers through his hair and surveyed her thoughtfully. "In the first place," he said, "it’s a very good thing to read history. I read a great deal of it--lives of famous men, and so on. In the second place, it’ll give you some idea of what a woman can do." "Yes, I know; only they’re all bad women," said Angelica, with simplicity. Eddie flushed. "Yes, but--everything was different in those days. They didn’t have our opportunities. Anyway, in some of the other volumes there are plenty of women who weren’t bad--Romans, and so on. What I meant is that it shows you what an influence a woman can have if she tries." "I guess they didn’t have to try." "Of course they did. They wanted to be powerful. They wanted to be magnificent. There aren’t any women like that now--no more magnificent women." He fell silent, to think for a time of his mother, of Polly, of the clerks in his office, of girls he had danced with, of girls on the stage, of all his limited feminine acquaintance. Not a vestige of magnificence! II He was a queer chap, was Eddie. Born of a selfish and frivolous mother and a morosely indifferent father, neglected, left in the care of servants of the sort that always collect about an extravagant and careless mistress, he had never acquired as a matter of course those ideals which the average boy of his class takes for granted. He had a perfectly natural inclination toward truth, honour, and justice, and toward clean living, but he had had to discover these virtues laboriously, all alone. In consequence, he gave them a sort of perverted importance. He became somewhat of a prig. And having with such difficulty discovered his truths, he was inclined to be a bit domineering and intolerant about them. He was angry and disappointed at finding any one imperfect.