"It throws light upon what you have been saying."
"So I meant. You will see, when you think about it, that I am acting strangely like a male creature. We females with minds have a way of doing that. I'll say more, for I really want you to understand me. 'The sudden possession of wealth' has not, as you suppose, turned my head, but it has given my thoughts a most salutary shaking, and made me feel twice the woman that I was. At this moment, I should as soon think of taking a place as kitchen-maid as of becoming any man's wife. I am free, and have power to assert myself—the first desire, let me assure you, of modern woman no less than of modern man. That I shall assert myself for the good of others is a peculiarity of mine, a result of my special abilities; I take no credit for it. Some day we shall meet again, and talk over our experiences; for the present, let us be content with corresponding now and then. You shall have my address as soon as I am settled."
She rose, and Lashmar gazed at her. He saw that she was as little to be moved by an appeal, by an argument, as the marble bust behind her.
"I suppose," he said, "you will appear on platforms?"
"Oh dear no!" Constance replied, with a laugh. "My ambition doesn't take that form. I leave that to you, who are much more eloquent."
"How you have altered!" He kept gazing at her, with a certain awe. "I hardly know you."
"I doubt whether you know me at all. Never mind." She held out her hand. "We may be friends yet when you have come to understand that you are not so very, very much my superior."
CHAPTER XXVII
Lashmar walked back to Hollingford, and reached the hotel without any consciousness of the road by which he had come. He felt as tired as if he had been walking all day. When he had dropped into an easy chair, he let his arms hang, and, with head drooping forward, stared at his feet stretched out before him: the posture suggested a man half overcome with drink.