“There are a few minor chances she ought to have,” said Coombe. “A governess is one. Mademoiselle Vallé will be here at eleven.” “I can’t see that she promises to be such a beauty,” fretted Feather. “She’s the kind of good looking child who might grow up into a fat girl with staring black eyes like a barmaid.” “Occasionally pretty women do abhor their growing up daughters,” commented Coombe letting his eyes rest on her interestedly. “I don’t abhor her,” with pathos touched with venom. “But a big, lumping girl hanging about ogling and wanting to be ogled when she is passing through that silly age! And sometimes you speak to me as a man speaks to his wife when he is tired of her.” “I beg your pardon,” Coombe said. “You make me feel like a person who lives over a shop at Knightsbridge, or in bijou mansion off Regent’s Park.” But he was deeply aware that, as an outcome of the anomalous position he occupied, he not infrequently felt exactly this. That a governess chosen by Coombe—though he would seem not to appear in the matter—would preside over the new rooms, Feather knew without a shadow of doubt. A certain almost silent and always high-bred dominance over her existence she accepted as the inevitable, even while she fretted helplessly. Without him, she would be tossed, a broken butterfly, into the gutter. She knew her London. No one would pick her up unless to break her into smaller atoms and toss her away again. The freedom he allowed her after all was wonderful. It was because he disdained interference. But there was a line not to be crossed—there must not even be an attempt at crossing it. Why he cared about that she did not know. “You must be like Cæsar’s wife,” he said rather grimly, after an interview in which he had given her a certain unsparing warning. “And I am nobody’s wife. What did Cæsar’s wife do?” she asked. “Nothing.” And he told her the story and, when she had heard him tell it, she understood certain things clearly.