So much for George’s father and George’s death. The “reactions” (as they are called) of Mrs. Winterbourne were different. She found it rather exciting and stimulating at first, especially erotically stimulating. She was a woman who constantly dramatized herself and her life. She was as avid of public consideration as an Italian lieutenant, no matter what the quality of the praise. The only servants who ever stayed more than a trial month with her were those who bowed themselves to an abject discipline of adulation for Mrs. Winterbourne, Mrs. Winterbourne’s doings and sayings and possessions and whims and friends. Only, since Mrs. Winterbourne was exceedingly fickle and quarrelsome, and was always changing friends into enemies and vowed enemies into hollow friends, a more than diplomatic suppleness was exacted of these mercenary retainers, who only stayed with her because she gave them presents or raised their wages whenever the praise was really gratifying. Although a lady of “mature charms,” Mrs. Winterbourne loved to fancy herself as a delicious young thing of seventeen, passionately beloved by a sheik-like but nevertheless “clean” (not to say “straight”) Englishman. She was a mistress of would-be revolutionary platitudes about marriage and property (rather like the talk of an “enlightened” parson) but, in fact, was as sordid, avaricious, conventional and spiteful middle-middle class woman as you could dread to meet. Like all her class, she toadied to her betters and bullied her inferiors. But, with her conventionality, she was, of course, a hypocrite. In her kittenish moods, which she cultivated with a strange lack of a sense of congruity, she liked to throw out hints about “kicking over the traces.” But, as a matter of fact, she never soared much above tippling, financial dishonesty, squabbling, lying, betting, and affairs with bounderish young men, whom only her romantic effrontery could have dared describe as “clean and straight,” although there was no doubt whatever about their being English, and indeed sportin’ in a more or less bounderish way.