So, then, according to the world's view, she was in the position of many women who held their heads high, and thought of the world generally as their playground, the place kindly provided for the amusement of their spare time, of which they had twenty-four hours every day. Whether the disrepute of all these was as reliable as that which she had herself just gained was not the immediate point to be considered; but certainly, if one took a man like Arthur Naseby into a corner, he would, with no encouragement at all, tell an intimate and abominable history of half the folk he knew. For herself, she was not in the habit of taking this stout and poisonous gentleman into corners. Scandalous stories did not amuse her, particularly if they were true, and immorality she thought to be a thing not only wicked, but vulgar. Wickedness, as she had once said, seemed to the world in which she lived merely an obsolete term, describing a moral condition which had no appreciable existence; and sometimes she wondered whether vulgarity was not passing into the category of words without significance. And now it appeared that people were saying about her what they said about so many others, with no sense of condemnation, but--and here lay the nausea of the thing--with amusement. She could almost hear Arthur's voice stridently declaiming: "After all, poor thing, why shouldn't she amuse herself like everybody else? It was the one thing wanted to make her perfectly charming. But I think we shall hear less about the stupidity and vulgarity of the world. Artistically speaking, she ought to have modulated the change more. Just a shade too abrupt--a little Wagnerian in its change of key;" and roars of laughter would follow. But this new condition in her life had by no means constituted the sum of these three days' meditation in the country. With the elasticity inherent in human nature, the moment the new condition had been made, her mental fibres set themselves automatically to adjust themselves to it. Doctors say that any patient adjusts himself to the most fatal sentence in twenty-four hours; the thing becomes a part of life. It was so with her, and now she felt, though not reconciled, at any rate used to the thing. Though highly introspective, she was not, in the ordinary sense of the word, self-conscious, and she no longer believed that the changed glances of the world at her would affect her very seriously. Surely she could manage to take them at their correct and worthless valuation. At first the thought of that had seemed intolerable; but after three days she was beginning to feel she cared very appreciably less.