His crime against her seemed to her monstrous. It was indeed of the kind which no woman forgives. It was the cruellest of all insults; one which was based upon fact. To her own idea she had very delicately and good-naturedly intimated to her friend that she would arrange her future so that their relation should be as undisturbed as in the past. If that did not merit a man’s gratitude, what did? Yet, instead of thanks, he had spoken to her as she had not supposed women were spoken to outside the Haymarket or the Rat Mort. She never admitted to herself that she did wrong; much less had she ever permitted anyone else to hint that she did so. A bad woman! Ladies like herself can no more conceive such a phrase being used to describe them than a winner of the Oaks could imagine herself between a costermonger’s shafts. All that they do is ticketed under pretty or pleasant names on the shelves of their memories; tact, friendship, amusement, sympathy, convenience, amiability, health, one or other of these nice sounding words labels every one of their motives or actions. To class themselves with “bad people” never enters their minds for a moment; Messalina would certainly never have dreamed of being classed with the horizontales of the Suburra. What made it worse was that she was still fond of him, though he often bored her. She would have given ten years of life to have had his face under her foot and to have stamped it into blurred ugliness as she had stamped the wheelbarrow into atoms. But these fierce simple pleasures, alas! are only allowed to the women of the Haymarket and the Rat Mort.