"Isn't your curiosity terrible, Ellen!" he said, laughing. "If you didn't happen to have a kind heart hidden somewhere about you, you'd be a perfectly impossible woman. As it is, I'm not sure that you're not." "I think perhaps I am," Ellen answered, laughing. "I do take a great interest in other people's affairs. Well, why not? It prevents me from being bored." "But not from being a bore," said Ronder. "I hate to be unpleasant, but there's nothing more tiresome than being asked why one's in a certain mood. However, leave me alone and I will repay your curiosity by some of my own. Tell me, how much are people talking about Mrs. Brandon and Morris?" This time she was genuinely surprised. On so many occasions he had checked her love of gossip and scandal and now he was deliberately provoking it. It was as though he had often lectured her about drinking too much and then had been discovered by her, secretly tippling. "Oh, everybody's talking, of course," she said. "Although you pretend never to talk scandal you must know enough about the town to know that. They happen to be talking less just at the moment because nobody's thinking of anything but the Jubilee." "What I want to know," said Ronder, "is how much Brandon is supposed to be aware of--and does he mind?" "He's aware of nothing," said Ellen decisively. "Nothing at all. He's always looked upon his wife as a piece of furniture, neither very ornamental nor very useful, but still his property, and therefore to be reckoned on as stable and submissive. I don't think that in any case he would ever dream that she could disobey him in anything, but, as it happens, his son's flight to London and his own quarrel with you entirely possess his mind. He talks, eats, thinks, dreams nothing else." "What would he do, do you think," pursued Ronder, "if he were to discover that there really _was_ something wrong, that she had been unfaithful?" "Why, is there proof?" asked Ellen Stiles, eagerly, pausing for a moment in her excitement. The sharp note of eagerness in her voice checked him. "No--nothing," he said. "Nothing at all. Of course not. And how should I know if there were?" "You're just the person who would know," answered Ellen decisively. "However many other people you've hoodwinked, you haven't taken _me_ in all these years. But I'll tell you this as from one friend to another, that you've made the first mistake in your life by allowing this quarrel with Brandon to become so public." He marvelled again, as he had often marvelled before, at her unerring genius for discovering just the thing to say to her friends that would hurt them most. And yet with that she had a kind heart, as he had had reason often enough to know. Queer things, women! "It's not my fault if the quarrel's become public," he said. They were turning down the High Street now and he could not show all the vexation that he felt. "It's Brandon's own idiotic character and the love of gossip displayed by this town."