‘Yes?’ answered Gundred, gelid with wrath, yet, despite herself, enthralled in Mrs. Mimburn’s dreadful foreshadowings. She began to have some notion what it was that she had been finding unsatisfactory in her relations with Kingston. He petted her more and more, but more and more did he talk to Isabel, and his recent efforts to include Gundred only revealed his inability to do so. This it was, this situation of her own making, that had been giving her secret, unacknowledged qualms, and feelings of vague hunger. The more proudly, then, did she revolt against Mrs. Mimburn’s insinuations, and the vigour of her anger was the measure of her inward conviction that the insinuations held some truth. Minne-Adélaïde thought that she held Gundred helpless. She presumed on her power, made reckless at once by boredom and by gratified spite. ‘Oh, well,’ she pursued, ‘it may pay to leave your husband for ever alone with Isabel. I can’t say. It wouldn’t pay with any other man or any other woman. But, of course, your husband _may_ be an exception. Most husbands are--to their wives--until the catastrophe. Now, if I were you, I should want to know a great deal more about that night they got lost on the hill together--or said they did. That sort of thing isn’t done, you know. It wants a good deal of explaining.’ Confronted with the final insult, all Gundred’s pride, the best side of her courage rallied to her aid. Her manner betrayed no agitation, paid Mrs. Mimburn no compliment of excitement. Perfectly cool and level was her voice as she looked up and answered: ‘You seem to forget that we are not living in one of that dreadful man’s plays,’ she said. ‘I should despise myself if ever I were capable of having such thoughts of my husband or my cousin. As you said just now, such things are not done--in the class I know, at all events.’ She fixed a cool, contemptuous, grey stare on the astounded Minne-Adélaïde, who suddenly had an unaccustomed feeling of getting the worst of it. Fluttered by this sudden revolt, Mrs. Mimburn made an effort to recover lost ground. ‘I am sorry you take it like that,’ she began. ‘Of course one does not mean to accuse----’ ‘We will talk of something else--yes?’ said Gundred very coolly, but with complete decision. Minne-Adélaïde gasped. She considered her attitude towards life all that was _chic_, up-to-date, and sound. She imagined that no man or woman could ever spend the dark hours in each other’s neighbourhood without the ultimate disaster, and piqued herself on the smart knowledge of the world that discerned adultery in the most casual compliments. Gundred’s sudden revolt was preposterous in its ignorance of human nature, as well as supremely insolent in its offhand condemnation of her own views. She completely lost her temper.