He saw her sit, looking down at the point of her umbrella.
“I’ve got to get him well,” she said. “Tell me the truth.”
“Yes, it was Lady Hudson,” he answered. “But you aren’t going to ...”
“Robert dear,” she said, with her little, clear, appealing voice. “You can’t make such a mistake as to think that I am going to hamper Dudley. It’s my task in life to keep him going. Think it out. I’m not really the girl to give ourselves away. I turned Dudley out of my mother’s house. I ought not to have done it, but mother could not bear him. Perhaps I valued mother more than Dudley—perhaps that was wrong. But I’ve heard you say: ‘Do what you want and take what you get for it.’ I’m taking what I get for it, and it’s easier to do it because I know what men are.”
“It wasn’t Dudley’s doing,” Grimshaw said. “We can’t even tell...”
“Robert, dear,” she repeated, “I have been a nursery-governess, you know.”
“Oh yes,” he answered, “but you’re a woman too.”
“Oh yes,” she imitated him, “but I’m a woman of our class. Don’t you see the two things I’ve learned? One is, that we can’t have what we want. I may have wanted ... Well, that does not matter. But if I couldn’t give, I could get—adoration. That’s all there is to it.”
Robert Grimshaw said suddenly: “Yes, you could make something out of poor Dudley.”
“I won’t say that it doesn’t hurt,” she took him up: “it does. Or, no, it doesn’t. Well, one can’t say.... Up in the nursery at the Brigstocks’ there were great big clumsy boys. They adored me, and it was my business to make men of them—at any rate, during the holidays. Well, they’d disobey me. Sometimes they’d even deceive me—rather meanly, in little things; and then they’d behave like Dudley. So that I’m used to it on a small scale. It’s saddening that a man can’t be quite true, even when he adores you; but he can’t. That’s all.”