"Westboro' has the companion to this," he had not minded telling her as they sat together in the small room he had grown to know as well as the larger rooms of the castle. And at the end of a few moments Bulstrode quite blurted out: "Why, in Heaven's name do you women make men suffer so?"
The Duchess, who had been working, dropped her bit of muslin and looked, with her cherry lips parted and her great serious eyes, for all the world like a lady in a gift book. Her face was eighteenth century and child-like.
Bulstrode nodded. "Oh, yes, you've got so easily the upper hand, the very least of you, you know, over the best of us. It's such an unfair supremacy. You've got such a clever knowledge of little things, such a sense of the scale of the feelings, and you certainly make the very most of your power over us all. Can't you—" and his eyes, half serious and half reproachful, seemed, as he looked at her, to question all the womankind he knew—"Can't you ever love us well enough just quite simply to make us happy?"
The Duchess had taken up her sewing again, and her eyes were upon it. Bulstrode waited for a little, following her stitches through the muslin and the flash of her thimble in the light.
"Can't you?" he softly repeated. "Isn't it, after all, a good sort of way of spending one's life, this making another happy?"
"American women aren't taught so, you know," she said. "It isn't taught us that the end and aim of our existence is to make a man happy."
Her companion didn't seem at all surprised.
"And so you see," she went on, "those of us that do learn that after all there may be something in what you say—those of us that learn, only find it out after a lot of hard experiences, and it is sometimes too late!"
She seemed to think his direct question called for a distinct answer, for she admitted: "Oh, yes, of course there are some of us who would give a great deal to try. And you see, moreover," she went on with her subject as she turned the corner of her square, "you put it well when you said 'love enough.' You see that's the whole thing, Mr. Bulstrode, to love enough. One can, of course, in that case, do nearly all there is to do, can't one?"
"Nearly all," he had smiled, and added: "And a great deal more."