Now, there is a sort of anger which, though it is often seen in combination with irritation and ill-temper, is something very different from either. It is not a quick-burning emotion; it is in no hurry to strike and to hurt, but is quite deliberate, very patient, and at the end, when a favourable opportunity presents itself, strikes hard. It was this quality of anger that entered into Mildred's mind when Maud told her of this interview. Had she been simply irritated with Marie or angry with an anger of the less dangerous and quicker sort, she would probably have rushed round to Park Lane, used the language of a cook to Marie, burst into tears, and probably made it up a day or two later. But she had not the slightest impulse to do any of those things. She was irritated with Maud, called her a fool, and sent her away. Then she sat down and thought about Marie. There occurred to her, of course, at once a very obvious method of injuring Marie. All London--every one, that is to say, who mattered at all--except Marie herself, knew that she and Jack had been great friends for a very long time. What would be the effect on Marie if she let her know quietly, drop by drop, as one lets absinthe cloud and embitter water, what had been going on so long, what she had been blind to so long! Mildred knew her to be a woman of a pride and fastidiousness quite beyond not only her own reach, but her own comprehension. This she had never either resented or envied; if people chose to behave in what she called a Holy Land manner, it was nothing to her, but she was not jealous of their unattainable Oriental longitudes. It was all very well to sit on a pedestal, but if you did, you had no idea what games went on in the jostling world below. Marie's habitual attitude was to put her nose in the air and draw her skirts away from the crowd; it would really be very humiliating for her to get to learn by degrees what had been going on all these years, to upset the pedestal, in fact, and let her struggle to her feet as best she could, to let her, who always professed to find scandal and gossip of all sorts so uninteresting, know for the first time a bit of it which she could scarcely consider dull.