"No. It would prove more if she didn't like _me_, which--fatuous fool as you may find me--I verily believe she does. If she hated me it would be, you see, for my ruthless analysis of her secret. She _has_ no secret. She would like awfully to have--and she would like almost as much to be believed to have. Last evening, after dinner, she could feel perhaps for a while that she _was_ believed. But it won't do. There's nothing in it. You asked me just now," I pursued, "what the signs of such a secret would naturally be. Well, bethink yourself a moment of what the secret itself must naturally be." Oh, she looked as if she knew all about _that_! "Awfully charming--mustn't it?--to act upon a person, through an affection, so deeply." "Yes--it can certainly be no vulgar flirtation." I felt a little like a teacher encouraging an apt pupil; but I could only go on with the lesson. "Whoever she is, she gives all she has. She keeps nothing back--nothing for herself." "I see--because _he_ takes everything. He just cleans her out." She looked at me--pleased at last really to understand--with the best conscience in the world. "Who _is_ the lady then?" But I could answer as yet only by a question. "How can she possibly be a woman who gives absolutely nothing whatever; who scrapes and saves and hoards; who keeps every crumb for herself? The whole show's there--to minister to Lady John's vanity and advertise the business--behind her smart shop-window. You can see it, as much as you like, and even amuse yourself with pricing it. But she never parts with an article. If poor Long depended on _her_----" "Well, what?" She was really interested. "Why, he'd be the same poor Long as ever. He would go as he used to go--naked and unashamed. No," I wound up, "he deals--turned out as we now see him--at another establishment." "I'll grant it," said Mrs. Brissenden, "if you'll only name me the place." Ah, I could still but laugh and resume! "He doesn't screen Lady John--she doesn't screen herself--with your husband or with anybody. It's she who's herself the screen! And pleased as she is at being so clever, and at being thought so, she doesn't even know it. She doesn't so much as suspect it. She's an unmitigated fool about it. 'Of course Mr. Long's clever, because he's in love with me and sits at my feet, and don't you see how clever _I_ am? Don't you hear what good things I say--wait a little, I'm going to say another in about three minutes; and how, if you'll only give him time too, he comes out with them after me? They don't perhaps sound so good, but you see where he has got them. I'm so brilliant, in fine, that the men who admire me have only to imitate me, which, you observe, they strikingly do.' Something like that is all her philosophy." My friend turned it over. "You do sound like her, you know. Yet how, if a woman's stupid----"