“I ask you in plain words,” she went on, “do you acknowledge that you have been deceived by an adventuress who has personated me? Do you mean to restore me to my proper place in this house?”
Lady Janet returned to the arrangement of her papers.
“Does your ladyship refuse to listen to me?”
Lady Janet looked up from her papers as blandly as ever.
“If you persist in returning to your delusion,” she said, “you will oblige me to persist in returning to my papers.”
“What is my delusion, if you please?”
“Your delusion is expressed in the questions you have just put to me. Your delusion constitutes your peculiar claim on my forbearance. Nothing you can say or do will shake my forbearance. When I first found you in the dining-room, I acted most improperly; I lost my temper. I did worse; I was foolish enough and imprudent enough to send for a police officer. I owe you every possible atonement (afflicted as you are) for treating you in that cruel manner. I offered you the use of my boudoir, as part of my atonement. I sent for you, in the hope that you would allow me to assist you, as part of my atonement. You may behave rudely to me, you may speak in the most abusive terms of my adopted daughter; I will submit to anything, as part of my atonement. So long as you abstain from speaking on one painful subject, I will listen to you with the greatest pleasure. Whenever you return to that subject I shall return to my papers.”
Grace looked at Lady Janet with an evil smile.
“I begin to understand your ladyship,” she said. “You are ashamed to acknowledge that you have been grossly imposed upon. Your only alternative, of course, is to ignore everything that has happened. Pray count on my forbearance. I am not at all offended—I am merely amused. It is not every day that a lady of high rank exhibits herself in such a position as yours to an obscure woman like me. Your humane consideration for me dates, I presume, from the time when your adopted daughter set you the example, by ordering the police officer out of the room?”
Lady Janet’s composure was proof even against this assault on it. She gravely accepted Grace’s inquiry as a question addressed to her in perfect good faith.