"I don't know," she said feebly.
"Then, I will tell you," said Lady Ardingly. "Start a scandal—you are so good at it—about yourself and Jim Spencer. Nothing circumstantial—only let it be in the air. Let people say things; there is nothing easier. Then it will appear also that you have broken with Jack. That, I tell you, will not injure him. A married man is open to damaging scandals in two ways: one through himself, one through his wife. And in Jack's case, my dear, both these doors are flung wide, and Lady Brereton enters through each, trumpeting like—like an elephant."
Lady Ardingly nodded her head at Mildred, with the air of a nurse scolding a refractory child.
"Now, do not look so disconsolate, my dear," she went on, observing Mildred's face falling as a barometer falls before a cyclone, "but just bestir yourself. You should really in future consult somebody before you embark on these efforts. You have dug a bottomless well, so I may say, at the foot of the ladder by which your friend Jack was preparing to mount. There is room—just room—to get him on to it still. But there is only one way of doing it—that is, by stopping somehow or another that very silly story you made up about his wife, and by taking very great care how you are talked about in connection with him by the wrong people—just now, perhaps, by anybody. You can do both these things by letting it be supposed that you are intime with Mr. Spencer. Let us talk of something else."
Lady Ardingly rose with the air of closing the subject altogether. She knew exactly when to stop rubbing a thing in, the object of that salutary process being to make the place smart sufficiently, but not unbearably. Mildred, she considered, was smarting enough.
"And about your tall daughter?" she said. "How does that go?"
"She is lovable, and he loves her; but he is not lovable, and she does not love him," quoted Mildred, restraining quite admirably her impulse to sulk or lose her temper.
"Ah! you must give her time. If he is really in love with her, he will be very patient. And, since you love her," she added, without any change of voice, "you will be patient with her, too."
Mildred got up.
"I must go," she said. "Thank you very much, Lady Ardingly. I have made a mess of things."