Freda said to herself, "After all, she doesn't count. She doesn't know him."
Miss Nethersole smiled. "He's a male man, my dear. If you want him to have an even higher idea of your genius than he has already, tell him—tell him you owe it all to him."
"Ah," said Freda, "you don't know him."
"I have known him," said Miss Nethersole, "for fifteen years. I knew him before he married."
She had proved incontestably the superiority of her knowledge. Freda felt as if Miss Nethersole were looking at her to see how she would take it. There was an appreciable moment in which she adjusted her mind to the suddenness of the revelation. Then she told herself that there was nothing in it that she had not reckoned with many times before. It left her relations with Wilton Caldecott where they were.
There was nothing in it that could change for her the unique and immaterial tie. She was even relieved by the certainty that it was not Julia Nethersole, then, after all. She had an idea that she would have grudged him to Julia Nethersole.
Julia was much too well-bred to show that she had the advantage. She took it for granted that Miss Farrar was also acquainted with the circumstances of Wilton Caldecott's marriage.
"That," said she, "is what makes him so extraordinarily interesting."
"His marriage"—Freda hesitated. She wondered if Miss Nethersole would really go into it.
"Some people's marriages are quite unilluminating. Wilton's, I always think, is the key to his character, sometimes to his conduct."