“My dear” she said, “if you are strong and beautiful and rich and well dressed, so that people care to look at you, and listen to what you say, you can do things. But who, in England, will listen to a shabby, dowdy, frightened woman, when she runs away from her husband, if he follows her and tells people she is hysterical or mad or bad? It is the shabby, dowdy woman who is in the wrong. At first, I thought of nothing else but trying to get away. And once I went to Stornham station. I walked all the way, on a hot day. And just as I was getting into a third-class carriage, Nigel marched in and caught my arm, and held me back. I fainted and when I came to myself I was in the carriage, being driven back to the Court, and he was sitting opposite to me. He said, 'You fool! It would take a cleverer woman than you to carry that out.' And I knew it was the awful truth.” “It is not the awful truth now,” said Betty, and she rose to her feet and stood looking before her, but with a look which did not rest on chairs and tables. She remained so, standing for a few moments of dead silence. “What a fool he was!” she said at last. “And what a villain! But a villain is always a fool.” She bent, and taking Rosy's face between her hands, kissed it with a kiss which seemed like a seal. “That will do,” she said. “Now I know. One must know what is in one's hands and what is not. Then one need not waste time in talking of miserable things. One can save one's strength for doing what can be done.” “I believe you would always think about DOING things,” said Lady Anstruthers. “That is American, too.” “It is a quality Americans inherited from England,” lightly; “one of the results of it is that England covers a rather large share of the map of the world. It is a practical quality. You and I might spend hours in talking to each other of what Nigel has done and what you have done, of what he has said, and of what you have said. We might give some hours, I daresay, to what the Dowager did and said. But wiser people than we are have found out that thinking of black things past is living them again, and it is like poisoning one's blood. It is deterioration of property.” She said the last words as if she had ended with a jest. But she knew what she was doing. “You were tricked into giving up what was yours, to a person who could not be trusted. What has been done with it, scarcely matters. It is not yours, but Sir Nigel's. But we are not helpless, because we have in our hands the most powerful material agent in the world. “Come, Rosy, and let us walk over the house. We will begin with that.” CHAPTER XVII TOWNLINSON & SHEPPARD