But now she must bestir herself, see Winfrith, and that soon. He knew all about her affairs, and she intended that he should help her to hasten the inevitable formalities. As to what she was to say to him, how to offer, to one so matter-of-fact and clear-headed, any adequate reason for her proposed action, she trusted to her wit and to his obtuseness. He had often found the courage to tell her that some adequate provision should be made by her for the Melancthon Settlement, and that, as matters stood, too much was left to her own conscience and her own generosity. Well, she would now remind him of his unpalatable advice, and tell him that at last she was about to follow it. Penelope also found time, during the days which followed Downing's departure, to think of her mother--to wonder, with tightened throat, how Lady Wantley would meet the ordeal coming so swiftly to meet and overwhelm her. Even with those whose thoughts, emotions, and consciences seemed channelled in the narrowest grooves it is often difficult to foresee with what eyes, both of the body and of the soul, they will view any given set of circumstances. Lady Wantley had always seemed extremely wide-minded, in some ways nebulously so; but this had been in a measure owing, so Penelope now reminded herself, to the fact that she had lived a life so spiritually detached from those about her. Since her husband's death the mother's loyalty to her only child had been unswerving, and she seemed to have transferred to Penelope the unquestioning trust she had felt in Penelope's father. Old friends, including Mr. Julius Gumberg, had ventured to remonstrate, and very seriously, when the lovely, impulsive girl had announced her sudden engagement, after a strangely short acquaintance, to Melancthon Robinson; but Lady Wantley--and her daughter, looking back in after years, had often wondered sorely, with a shuddering retrospection, that it had been so--had seemed quite content, quite certain, that her beloved child was being Divinely guided. She had accepted, with the same curious detachment, the fact of Penelope's widowhood, and during the years which followed had encouraged her daughter to lead the life that suited her best, looking on with indulgent eyes while Mrs. Robinson enjoyed what she always later recalled as the 'Perdita' stage of her existence. This had been the period when the girl-widow, released from the bondage into which she had entered so lightly, returned with intense zest to the delightful frivolous world of which she had seen but little before her marriage. For three or four years Mrs. Robinson enjoyed all that this delicately dissipated section of society could give her in the way of lightly balanced emotion and fresh sensation, and her mother had been apparently in no wise shocked or surprised that it should be so.