"Oh, no, no," he softly ejaculated, "it is not fair! You're terribly wasted, and you've been, as you too well know, terribly betrayed."
But here he felt her hand on his arm with a strong grasp. She shook the arm a little.
"Don't go on," she said deeply. "I tell you not to go on." After a few seconds, in which he heard the fire and the slow bubbling of the gently boiling water and the cooing of the doves without, under the eaves, the Duchess said: "Listen to me. I haven't talked at all to you, let me say something now."
Her companion reflected to himself: "Well, at all events, she's not going to malign the Duke; that's a foregone conclusion."
The Duchess clasped her hands round her knee and raised her face to him.
"Do you think," she asked, "that there's any egoist as nasty as a feminine one? Men are admitted to be generally selfish, but we specialize, and each one of us has the faculty of getting up some new and peculiar brand, I begin to believe. At any rate, when I married, I was an egoist, and I've stayed on being one until a very little time ago. I suppose I must in a way have more or less ornamented my position, as the papers say. I did have two children as well, and in that way fulfilled my duty as a Westboro'. But really and truly, I have never in the least been a wife, and very little of a mother. I was as silly and vain as could be, and I never for a moment valued my husband. I wasn't indifferent to my children, but I was absorbed by my worldly life, and when my little boys were taken ill and died, I was on a dahabeah on the Nile, and I don't think that Cecil ever forgave us for being so far away."
She remained quiet for a long time, looking down at her hands, and when she lifted her face Bulstrode saw that she had wept.
"That," she went on, "broke the ice round my heart, when I came home to those empty rooms."
He said soothingly, "There, there, my child."
"Oh, let me go on," she urged him, "let me speak. I shall probably never feel like doing so again. But at that time when I turned to find my husband, I discovered that I had no power over him, and I realized that for years I had not possessed his love. I suppose you'll tell me that it is unusual for a woman to see so clearly as this. Perhaps it is. At any rate, just because I did so clearly, I forgave him when he came to me last year, at Cannes."