Mr. Dean reddened, but answered with considerable presence of mind that the possession of such a wife had no doubt hastened Mortomley's ruin as much as his fatal inattention to small details.
"Perhaps so," agreed Mrs. Dean, "but still she will help him to bear being ruined with equanimity. Dolly never was dull, and, I declare, when one comes to realize how fearfully dull almost every person is, I feel as if she must, by that one virtue, have condoned all the rest of her sins."
Which was really a very hard phrase for Mr. Dean to hear proceed from the lips of the woman he had honoured so far as to make mistress of Elm Park.
But Mrs. Dean was mistaken about Dolly, and Mr. Dean need have felt no fear that ever again she would make him the butt at which to aim the shafts of ridicule. For her the champagne of mirth had ceased to sparkle; for her there was no fun in pompous respectability; for her the glittering sparkle of wit had come to be but as a flare of light to one with a maddening headache.
The cakes and ale of life had been for her, but they were for her no more. Dolly, my Dolly, you were right when you said that last look on the dead face of Homewood killed you,—for the Dolly of an earlier time, so bright, so gracious, so happy, so young-looking, as girl, as wife, as mother, you were from thenceforth never beheld by human being.
CHAPTER VI.
SAUVE QUI PEUT.
When Mr. Swanland had sold off all the plant of Homewood, and got the best prices he could for Mortomley's carts and horses, Black Bess included, who had for months been so badly groomed that the auctioneer entered her as "One Brown Mare, Black Bess,"—he began to cast about him how anything more could be got out of Mortomley.