She felt her husband waiting patiently for her to quiet down and go on more coherently, and knew that his patience came from a long acquaintance with her mental habits, a certainty that her outbursts of feeling generally did quiet down if one waited: and across her genuine absorption in the story she was telling there flitted, bat-like, a distaste far being known so well as all that! There was something indiscreet and belittling in it, she thought, with an inward fastidious recoil. But this had gone, entirely, in a moment, and she was rushing on, "And, Neale, what _do_ you think? She has worked on him, and he has worked on himself till he's got himself in a morbid state. He thinks perhaps he ought to leave Ashley that he loves so much and go down to live where this horrid cousin lives. . . ." Her husband's astonishment at this was as great as she could have desired. None of Neale's usual, unsurprised acceptance of everything that happened as being in the nature of things, which occasionally so rubbed her the wrong way, and seemed to her so wilfully phlegmatic. He was sincerely amazed and astounded; that was plain from his exclamation, his tone, his face. Of course he wasn't as outraged as she, but that wasn't to be expected, since he hadn't seen so much of that dear old life-worn man, nor grown so protectingly fond of him. She revelled in Neale's astonishment as bearing out her own feeling. "Isn't it crazy, Neale! Don't you think it crazy! Is there the slightest justification for it? You feel, just as I do, don't you, that it's a perfectly unbalanced, fanatical, _fool_ish thing to think of doing, his going down into that hopeless mess?" But her husband had had a moment's time, while she exclaimed, to get back to his usual unhurried post in life. "It's certainly about as unexpected as anything I ever heard of," he admitted. "I should have to know a lot more about it, before I could be sure what to think."