Winnie, of course, distinguished her 'sort of thing' very broadly from 'the sort of thing' to which Mrs. Lenoir must be assumed to refer, but she made no secret of the state of the case or of her own attitude towards it. "I accept it absolutely, but I'm bitterly hurt by the way it was done."
"Oh, you can put it that way, my dear; but you're human like the rest of us, and, of course, you hate having him taken away from you. Now shall I try what I can do?"
"Not for the world! Not a word, nor a sign! It's my mistake, and I stand by it. If he came back, it would never be the same thing. It was beautiful; it would be shameful now."
Mrs. Lenoir smiled doubtfully; she had an imperfect understanding of the mode of thought.
"Very well, that's settled. And, for my part, I think you're well rid of him. A weak creature! Let him marry a Bloomsbury girl, and I hope she'll keep him in fine order. But what are you going to do?"
"I don't quite know. Stephen and Tora would let me go back to Shaylor's Patch for as long as I liked."
"Oh, Shaylor's Patch! To talk about it all, over and over again!"
A note of impatience in her friend's voice was amusingly evident to Winnie. "You mean the less I talk about it, the better?" she asked, smiling.
"Well, you haven't made exactly a success of it, have you?" The manner was kinder than the words.
"And I didn't make exactly a success of my marriage either," Winnie reflected, in a puzzled dolefulness. Because, if both orthodoxy and unorthodoxy go wrong, what is a poor human woman to do? "Well, if I mayn't go to Shaylor's Patch—at present, anyhow—I must stay here, Mrs. Lenoir; that's all. The studio's in my name, because I could give better security than Godfrey, and I can stay if I want to."