There were many men who were devoted to her, but as she ran over their names in her mind she could think of no one whose adoration, whether expectant or retrospective, would be equal to such a strain on it as that; nor everyone to whom she could quite safely trust her secret. There are very pretty theories and ideals about the honor of men of the world, but she knew such men down to the ground, as she would have phrased it, and she had few illusions about their honor. She knew that when they are in love with one woman they show up to that one all the others who have preceded her in their affections. Harry, indeed, she might have trusted; but she had broken with him, and even if she had not done so, he could no more have raised a seventh part of the money than he could have uprooted St. James’s Palace. He was stone broke, as he said himself. Her little travelling timepiece, which stood on her writing-table, seemed to sway over the seconds and minutes with a fiendish rapidity. Half an hour had gone by since her brother had left her, and she was no nearer a solution to her torturing difficulties. Other women would have weakened and compromised themselves by running to some female confidant, but she had none; with her own sisters she was always on the terms of an armed neutrality and in female friends she had never seen any object or savor. As soon as a woman was intimate with you she only tried to take your men away from you; she never gave any woman the opportunity to do so. Another quarter of an hour passed by; she heard her horses stamping on the stones beneath the windows; she heard the children scamper down the staircase on their way to their afternoon walk in the park; she heard people drive up and drive away as they were met by the inexorable “Not at home” of the good-looking youth in powder and black shoulder-knots who opened the hall door. How horrible! she thought, oh, how horrible! This might be the very last day on which anybody would call on her! For she knew well enough that the offence she had committed was one which, once made public, would close to her the only world for which she cared. “And yet I really meant no harm,” she thought. “I thought the thing was mine or would be. Why did that odious Poodle lend it me? So treacherous! Why did he not explain to me that it was a ‘chattel’? What is a chattel? Why did Beaumont advance the money upon it? He was much more to blame than I am, because of course he knew the law.” In that she was perhaps not wrong, for though the world may blame only the borrower, the lender is not seldom the wickeder of the two.