"I know Francis Breton. Don't you know too the kind of man that he is? Don't you know that he's as weak as a man can be, weaker than any woman ever _could_ be? He's the kind of man who must have society to bolster him up. If the men of his world are supporting him then he's as good as gold, as fine as you like. Let them leave him and down he goes. All his life the world's been down on him and that's why he's been down. Lately he's been quiet--he's been winning his place back. Soon, if he's patient, they'll all come round him again. But let him go off with you and he's done, finished--absolutely, utterly. 'Ah!' everyone will say, 'that's what we expected. That's what we always knew would happen.' Don't you know what kind of effect _that_ will have upon him? Don't you know?... Of course you do. It will break him up. His old life abroad, creeping from place to place, will begin again, only now he'll have the additional knowledge that he's done for you as well as for himself. It will be the end, utterly the end of him. And I, who love him, will not let it be." Lizzie's speech had roused in Rachel one of those old storms of anger. She was exerting now her utmost self-control, but her heart seemed bound tight with some cord so slender that one movement, one impulse, would snap it--Then.... She saw in Lizzie now, only moved by a sense of jealous injury--"She sits there, knowing that I've taken him from her. That's it.... That's what she's feeling--she's lost him. She can't forgive me for that." But when she spoke her voice was quiet and controlled. "That isn't so," Rachel said; "it won't, I think, be like that. There's so much more between us than you can understand. There's all our early life--not that we were together, but we seem to have it all in common, to have known it all together. We're unlike our family--all the Beaminsters--we're together in that--we are together in everything." But Lizzie's voice went on, so coldly, with such assurance that, with every word, the flame of Rachel's anger climbed a little higher, grew stronger and steadier. "There's another thing too. I watched you, more than you know. No, no man--no man in the world--will ever keep you altogether--there's something--I can't tell you what it is--there's something in you that demands more than just a personal relationship like that--Perhaps it's maternity--it is, with many women,--perhaps it's a great cause, a movement of a country-- "But I know, with certainty, that you will never love Breton as you should love a man. Realization will never be the thing to you that anticipation and retrospection are. I believe if you were to lose your husband now, you'd find that you loved him--All thoughts of Francis Breton, would go----"