Tears had sprung in her eyes. A fortune coming to him, a golden world; and against that, a minor exudation of the lachrymatory glands, a trembling drop or two of water, so small, so transitory, so brief. Yet he stood like a man beneath a breaking dam, instead of a man above a weeping woman.

“But why… ?”

She looked up then, with an intense earnestness and supplication; with a declaration so unmistakable that words were needless; with a nakedness that made any evasion—any other “My dear Miss Woodruff!”—impossible.

He slowly reached out his hands and raised her. Their eyes remained on each other’s, as if they were both hypnotized. She seemed to him—or those wide, those drowning eyes seemed—the most ravishingly beautiful he had ever seen. What lay behind them did not matter. The moment overcame the age.

He took her into his arms, saw her eyes close as she swayed into his embrace; then closed his own and found her lips. He felt not only their softness but the whole close substance of her body; her sudden smallness, fragility, weakness, tenderness—

He pushed her violently away.

An agonized look, as if he was the most debased criminal caught in his most abominable crime. Then he turned and rushed through the door—into yet another horror. It was not Doctor Grogan.

Ernestina had, that previous night, not been able to sleep. She knew perfectly well which windows in the White Lion were Charles’s, and she did not fail to note that his light was still on long after her aunt’s snores began to creep through the silent house. She felt hurt and she felt guilty in about equal parts—that is, to begin with. But when she had stolen from her bed for quite the sixteenth time to see if the light still burned, and it did, her guilt began to increase. Charles was very evidently, and justly, displeased with her.

Now when, after Charles’s departure, Ernestina had said to herself—and subsequently to Aunt Tranter—that she really didn’t care a fig for Winsyatt, you may think that sour grapes would have been a more appropriate horticultural metaphor. She had certainly wooed herself into graciously accepting the role of chatelaine when Charles left for his uncle’s, had even begun drawing up lists of “Items to be attended to”… but the sudden death of that dream had come as a certain relief. Women who run great houses need a touch of the general about them; and Ernestina had no military aspirations whatever. She liked every luxury, and to be waited on, hand if not foot; but she had a very sound bourgeois sense of proportion. Thirty rooms when fifteen were sufficient was to her a folly. Perhaps she got this comparative thrift from her father, who secretly believed that “aristocrat” was a synonym of “vain ostentation,” though this did not stop him basing a not inconsiderable part of his business on that fault, or running a London house many a nobleman would have been glad of—or pouncing on the first chance of a title that offered for his dearly beloved daughter. To give him his due, he might have turned down a viscount as excessive; a baronetcy was so eminently proper.

I am not doing well by Ernestina, who was after all a victim of circumstances; of an illiberal environment. It is, of course, its essentially schizophrenic outlook on society that makes the middle class such a peculiar mixture of yeast and dough. We tend nowadays to forget that it has always been the great revolutionary class; we see much more the doughy aspect, the bourgeoisie as the heartland of reaction, the universal insult, forever selfish and conforming. Now this Janus-like quality derives from the class’s one saving virtue, which is this: that alone of the three great castes of society it sincerely and habitually despises itself. Ernestina was certainly no exception here. It was not only Charles who heard an unwelcome acidity in her voice; she heard it herself. But her tragedy (and one that remains ubiquitous) was that she misapplied this precious gift of self-contempt and so made herself a victim of her class’s perennial lack of faith in itself. Instead of seeing its failings as a reason to reject the entire class system, she saw them as a reason to seek a higher. She cannot be blamed, of course; she had been hopelessly well trained to view society as so many rungs on a ladder; thus reducing her own to a mere step to something supposedly better.

Thus (“I am shameful, I have behaved like a draper’s daughter”) it was, in the small hours, that Ernestina gave up the attempt to sleep, rose and pulled on her peignoir, and then unlocked her diary. Perhaps Charles would see that her window was also still penitentially bright in the heavy darkness that followed the thunderstorm. Meanwhile, she set herself to composition.

I cannot sleep. Dearest C. is displeased with me—I was so very upset at the dreadful news from Winsyatt. I wished to cry, I was so very vexed, but I foolishly said many angry, spiteful things—which I ask God to forgive me, remembering I said them out of love for dearest C. and not wickedness. I did weep most terribly when he went away. Let this be a lesson to me to take the beautiful words of the Marriage Service to my conscience, to honor and obey my dearest Charles even when my feelings would drive me to contradict him. Let me earnestly and humbly learn to bend my horrid, spiteful willfulness to his much greater wisdom, let me cherish his judgment and chain myself to his heart, for “The sweet of true Repentance is the gate to Holy Bliss.”

You may have noted a certain lack of Ernestina’s normal dryness in this touching paragraph; but Charles was not alone in having several voices. And just as she hoped he might see the late light in her room, so did she envisage a day when he might coax her into sharing this intimate record of her prenuptial soul. She wrote partly for his eyes—as, like every other Victorian woman, she wrote partly for His eyes. She went relieved to bed, so totally and suitably her betrothed’s chastened bride in spirit that she leaves me no alternative but to conclude that she must, in the end, win Charles back from his infidelity.

And she was still fast asleep when a small drama took place four floors below her. Sam had not got up quite as early as his master that morning. When he went into the hotel kitchen for his tea and toasted cheese—one thing few Victorian servants did was eat less than their masters, whatever their lack of gastronomic propriety—the boots greeted him with the news that his master had gone out; and that Sam was to pack and strap and be ready to leave at noon. Sam hid his shock. Packing and strapping was but half an hour’s work. He had more pressing business.

He went immediately to Aunt Tranter’s house. What he said we need not inquire, except that it must have been penetrated with tragedy, since when Aunt Tranter (who kept uncivilized rural hours) came down to the kitchen only a minute later, she found Mary slumped in a collapse of tears at the kitchen table. The deaf cook’s sarcastic uplift of her chin showed there was little sympathy there. Mary was interrogated; and Aunt Tranter soon elicited, in her briskly gentle way, the source of misery; and applied a much kinder remedy than Charles had. The maid might be off till Ernestina had to be attended to; since Miss Ernestina’s heavy brocade curtains customarily remained drawn until ten, that was nearly three hours’ grace. Aunt Tranter was rewarded by the most grateful smile the world saw that day. Five minutes later Sam was to be seen sprawling in the middle of Broad Street. One should not run full tilt across cobbles, even to a Mary.