But she had no intention of making him ridiculous. She had liked him too well for that, owed him too much. They could give out they were starting for Europe or South America—which he often talked of visiting—and he could travel while she lived in secrecy at the manor. The manor was her best friend. A friend, it seemed to her, and not only last night, that had schooled and soothed and strengthened her for centuries. A part of her. Even the blood that had come down to her had stained its boards. There had been a duel out there in the hall. And, in another century, an unbridled Carteret, who loved the wife of his guest, had been stabbed in his bedroom—the one her imperturbable grandmother had chosen for her own. . . . Poor Eustace! What irony! Years of seeking for the one woman who exteriorized his secret fixation, to find her only to learn that the shell had deluded him, that there was nothing within it for him. Worse. To train her, to wear down her defenses, to deliver her from her accumulated obliquities, for another man. What was the matter with life? Controlled it would seem, not by a Beneficent Power, but by what Poe had called the Imp of the Perverse. . . . The only thing she hated to give up was Bladina’s pearls! And the Brittany set. But no doubt she could buy that from Eustace. . . . She told herself harshly that she was twisting and turning from that final probing, and after a moment of real terror, in which she felt an impulse to flee from the room, tearing off that whispering old gown as she ran, she set her teeth and went to the brink and peered down once more. She was in love with Geoffrey Pelham. She said the words aloud to steady her nerves with their finality. Then shrugged her shoulders and settled back in her chair, although she kicked a stool across the room. Well, what did it mean? What was she to do about it? He had been obsessing her conscious mind since the night at the Pleydens’, possibly her unconscious since they had sat together in this room. Now that she had hauled him out into the light he would probably obsess every waking moment and haunt her dreams. She felt that no caged eagle could be more resentful than she at this moment. Her pride had been as abnormal as her existence. Her ego could hardly have been more extended if she had been a heroin addict. That old dream of herself, solitary on a solitary peak had been more than an escape-fulfillment; it had been a reveling of the ego in its complete independence. And there was no independence in the surrender of one’s ego to another, even in this latter-day pretense of fifty-fifty. Women were exactly the same fundamentally as they had always been. Their instinct was surrender—blind instinct of the race to survive.