“Do you like that sort of subject best yourself?” Mrs. Elles said wistfully, going out of herself for once, into the other woman’s mind, and realizing the bitterness of renunciation that informed the words so laughingly spoken. “Oh, I--well, I am a woman, and no wiser than the rest. That is why I have been telling you all this, because if you once realize that I--have been there myself, in short--you will more readily let me help you and him. You see, though I am hopeless--absolutely hopeless”--Mrs. Elles stared; this strange woman might have been talking about cooks, for all the emotion she showed--“I am not even miserable about it. I know so well that if Edmund came to me and went down on his knees to me to marry him, I should refuse, he could not make me as happy as he makes me now. If I were a wife, I should not care to be second to anything, not even to Art, nor would you. I have realized the finality of it all, and so must you. But now, you must trust me, please, and not think, when I talk to you of your affairs and Edmund’s, that I am fighting for my own hand, and mean to secure him for myself, in the end, as soon as I have helped him to get clear of his entanglement with you. You see--I speak quite plainly.” Mrs. Elles’s eager disclaimer of any such interpretation of Egidia’s behaviour was not so much the outcome of an emotional confidence in the woman who had so bravely, so wildly, so foolishly committed herself, as of the strong conviction which her words carried. She was secretly a little overcome and puzzled by the spectacle of so much single-mindedness and bonhomie in the unveiling of a soul’s tragedy, such as she conceived Egidia’s to be. She herself could not have been anything but tortuous in the telling of such a piece of secret history. The novelist’s methods were not hers. They went with the whole character of the woman, with the honest eyes, and shrewd, fine, but uncompromising mouth. CHAPTER XIII Egidia used her novelist’s privilege of supposed social emancipation sometimes, and braved conventionalities. She went once--or twice--to see her cousin in his studio. It was obviously impossible for her to receive him in her own house, while Mrs. Elles was an inmate of it. Mrs. Elles had now been her guest for some months. She had written at the outset, in obedience to Egidia’s instructions, a letter to her husband, long and reasonable, announcing her present whereabouts, and laying the circumstances and facts of her stay in Yorkshire fully before him. His only reply to her had been a curt communication through his lawyers, informing her that he was determined to proceed with the case, and would even consent to defray the cost of her defence by a suitable firm of London solicitors, whose name and address he mentioned.