Things had not gone altogether smoothly¹ with the Duchess herself since the breaking up of the party at Gatherum Castle,—nor perhaps quite smoothly with the Duke. It was now March. The House was again sitting, and they were both in London,—but till they came to town they had remained at the Castle, and that huge mansion² had not been found to be more comfortable by either of them as it became empty. For a time the Duchess had been cowed by her husband's stern decision; but as he again became gentle to her,—almost seeming by his manner to apologise for his unwonted roughness,—she plucked up her spirit and declared to herself that she would not give up the battle. All that she did,—was it not for his sake? And why should she not have her ambition in life as well as he his? And had she not succeeded in all that she had done? Could it be right that she should be asked to abandon everything, to own herself to have been defeated, to be shown to have failed before all the world, because such a one as Major Pountney had made a fool of himself? She attributed it all to Major Pountney;—very wrongly. When a man's mind is veering³ towards some decision, some conclusion which he has been perhaps slow in reaching, it is probably a little thing which at last fixes his mind and clenches⁴ his thoughts. The Duke had been gradually teaching himself to hate the crowd around him and to reprobate⁵ his wife's strategy, before he had known that there was a Major Pountney under his roof. Others had offended him, and first and foremost among them his own colleague, Sir Orlando. The Duchess hardly read his character aright, and certainly did not understand his present motives⁶, when she thought that all might be forgotten as soon as the disagreeable savour of the Major should have passed away.

But in nothing, as she thought, had her husband been so silly as in his abandonment of Silverbridge. When she heard that the day was fixed⁷ for declaring the

分享到：