Some women were independent of experience, knew men by instinct. She felt that Ida, in a similar situation, would have had her way. She had not managed cleverly; no doubt with all her charm and her natural allurement for men, even a certain acquired coquetry, she was one of those women that could theorise brilliantly, but failed utterly to manage their own affairs at critical moments. She was well aware that she had not been developing along ideal lines of late, particularly since she had come out here with the unadmitted intention of stealing her friend’s husband. By all the laws of tradition she should be wicked all through. Pride, diffidence, fastidiousness--one or all, she was in no condition to decide--had prevented her from playing the deliberate rôle of siren. She sighed and wished that life could be played upon the formula adopted by so many brilliant novelists: a steady unrelenting development of character upon strictly logical lines and by means of cunningly created situations, that was as much like life as a mother’s formula would be for the thoughts and deeds of her children at a given hour a year hence. Ora did not know that most people in their rare moments of honest introspection find themselves singularly imperfect. She had looked for greater consistency in her complex recesses; assuming that if she made up her mind to take the husband of any woman, and that woman her best friend, she would be wholly hard and wicked, and, for the sake of the result, quite willing to achieve this consistent imperfection. And such hardness would be the surest of all solaces in the event of failure. She felt neither hard nor nearly as wicked as she should, but she did recognise the fact that if she had one more chance she would win by hook or crook. Her thoughts swung to Ida. What had she said to Gregory in that last decisive interview? Ida was as clever as the devil. She would watch her chance and make just the right appeal at the right moment. Gregory could be ruthless to the woman of whom he had wearied or to the woman he loved, but if his wife played upon his honour, his Western chivalry, his sense of fair play, and reiterated her own rights--to her would he lower his flag if it struck the life out of his own heart, and left himself nothing to feed the deep passion and romance of his nature for the rest of his life. In any case Ida had won.