“Tainted enough by coal smoke!” he retorted. “Spirits won’t stop that. I’d really like to get out, way out. Not just to follow the crowd, as they say, but we’ve never had a satisfactory country place, and I’ve come to think you can’t unless you make it a life accomplishment.” “A life is hardly enough, my dear brother,” replied Mrs. Seymour. “Trezevant is the accomplishment of three generations.” “Bah!” he replied, good-humouredly, “we’re not the slow coaches we used to be. You can get twice as much done these days in a third of the time.” “Well, at any rate, it’s unpractical now,” she replied, and he recognized the finality of her tone. Blaydon smoked his cigar in silence, while she finished her second black coffee and leaned back in her chair swinging a tiny foot of which she was proud. In the shimmering, palpable light, shot with many colours, Mathilda’s face and hair were still amazingly pretty. There were many who would have accepted the kind of slavery that marriage with her would have entailed, and some among them who had no need for her money. But she was not thinking of that. The arts of vanity had ceased to be a conscious lure; they were the essentials of well-bred self-cultivation. She had accepted her widowhood as the final failure of man, so far as she was concerned. It had been a romantic love match, ecstatic but unhappy, the kind that she fancied exhausted the capacity for passion; and now her thoughts ran upon the future of her brother’s household. For if Blaydon entertained any illusions about the possibility of his wife’s recovery, Mathilda did not. She had long held certain opinions regarding Jennie, which were not shared by the outside world. One of them was that her brother had never loved her, that he had found this out almost immediately after marrying, and determined to live the thing through because of his old-fashioned loyalty. Mathilda had quite certain knowledge that in the midst of the honeymoon he had rushed away and stayed several days. She knew it had been his hour of terrible trial, his angry realization of having made the first major mistake of his life, and made it in full maturity. His sister was proud of him for remaining a tree of marriage in a clearing of divorce stumps--for such their social world was rapidly becoming. But her theory was that Jennie had never forgiven him, never in a sense recovered from it. She had welcomed her children in order the more to seal up the truth from others; but she had borne them late, and the birth of the second son, Robert, had doomed her to physical helplessness.