She had done incalculable harm to Harry; she had worried, enslaved, and tormented the best years of his life; she had impoverished him utterly, she had stripped him of the little he had ever possessed, she had driven him into debt which would hang about his neck like a millstone to the day of his death; she had turned a simple and honest nature into devious and secret ways; she had made him lie, and laughed at him when he had been ashamed of lying; she had done him a world of harm, and in return he had only said five little rude words to her. But his offence seemed to her so enormous that if she had possessed the power she would have had him beaten with rods or roasted at a slow fire. That she had been his worst enemy she would never have admitted for one instant, never have supposed that anyone could think it. She considered that she had made him supremely happy during a very long period, that if she had ever given him cause for jealousy he had never known it, which is all that a well-bred man should expect; and that he had enjoyed the supreme felicity of being associated in her home life, of knowing all her worries and annoyances, and of being allowed to make an ass of himself in the nurseries in a simili-domestic fashion which was just suited to his simple tastes as a simili-bronze of a classic statuette is suited to the narrow purse of a tourist. His ingratitude seemed to her so vile, so enormous, that the immensity of her own wrongs made her submit to bear them in silence out of admiration of her own magnanimity and the serenity of her own certitude that she would avenge herself somehow or other to the smallest iota. She rang the bell, which was answered by a colleague of the young philosopher in powder of the anteroom. “The dogs have torn up this bonbon thing,” she said, pointing to the wreck of the ruined wheelbarrow. “Take it away and bring me some luncheon in here; only a quail and some plover eggs and some claret; order the carriage for three o’clock.” She felt exhausted from the extreme violence of her anger and the infamy of the affront she had received; and were Phedre or Dido or Cleopatra living on the brink of the twentieth century no one of them would any day go without her luncheon. They would know that their emotions “took it out” of them, that their nervous system was in danger when their affections are disturbed; they would know all about neurasthenia and marasma, and however angry or unhappy for Hippolytus, for Æneas, or for Anthony, would remember that they were organisms very easily put out of order, machines which require very regular nutrition; they would be fully conscious of the important functions of their livers, and would regulate their passions so as not to interfere with their digestions. CHAPTER XXIII.