"Don’t you resent it any more than that?" "Is that why you’re giving me the information—to see how much I resent it?" "Partly." "Then I’m afraid you will have your labor for your pains. You’ll never see more than you’re seeing at this instant." That stand was a master stroke. It gave her the advantage of being enigmatic. It enabled her to take blows without seeming to have felt them, and to deliver them without betraying the quarter from which the next would come. Right there and then Bradley had been monstrous enough to suggest that, since she liked Collingham Lodge, she should remain there and let him go away. He would make generous provision for her and the children, and in return expect his divorce. But she had taken her stand—the enigmatic. She didn’t argue; she didn’t plead; she didn’t reproach him; she didn’t treat him to the scene through which weaker women would have put him. "Bradley, I shall expect you to remain with me," were the only words she used. And he had remained. Less than two years later, it was she who fixed the sum the other woman was to be paid in order to get rid of her. She was sufficiently in sympathy with her sex to insist on the terms being liberal. "I think she should have fifty thousand dollars," she declared, and fifty thousand dollars the woman received. So that, if Bradley had lost the first passion of his love for her, he had gained vastly in respect. Hot-tempered, high-handed, impetuous, imperious, as he knew her to be, he saw her curb and compress these qualities till they became a prodigious motor force. If she had not mastered herself, she had mastered the expression of herself till she was an instrument at her own command. It was as an instrument at her own command that, on the Wednesday morning, before he went to town, she gave her husband as much information as she thought he ought to possess about his son. "Would you mind sitting down for a minute, Bradley? I’ve something important to say." He had come up to her room, as she took her breakfast in bed, after he had had his own downstairs. Wearing a lace dressing jacket and a boudoir cap, she was propped up with pillows, a wicker tray with legs on the coverlet before her. In the canopied Louis Quinze bed of old rich-grained walnut, raised six inches above the floor, she suggested an eighteenth-century French princess, Madame Sophie or Madame Victoire, receiving a courtier at her _levée_. Luxurious with a note of chastity was the rest of the chintzy room. The pictures on the walls were sacred ones, copies of old Italian masters. A _prie-dieu_ in a corner supported a bible and a prayer-book in tooled bindings with a coat of arms. The white-paneled wardrobe room seen through a door ajar was as austere as a well-kept sacristy. Perfumed air came in through the open windows, and thrushes were fluting in the trees.