weeks this interference from her husband had enhanced the amusement, giving an additional excitement to the game.  She felt herself to be woman misunderstood and ill-used; and to some women there is nothing so charming as a little mild ill-usage, which does not interfere with their creature comforts, with their clothes, or their carriage, or their sham jewels; but suffices to afford them the indulgence of a grievance.  Of late, however, Mr Dobbs Broughton had become a little too rough in his language, and things had gone uncomfortably.  She suspected that Conway Dalrymple was not the only cause of all this.  She had an idea that Mr Musselboro and Mrs Van Siever had it in their power to make themselves unpleasant, and that they were exercising this power.  Of his business in the City her husband never spoke to her, nor she to him.  Her own fortune had been very small, some couple of thousand pounds or so, and she conceived that she had no pretext on which she could, unasked, interrogate him about his money.  She had no knowledge that marriage of itself had given her the right to such interference; and had such knowledge been hers she would have had no desire to interfere.  She hoped that the carriage and sham jewels would be continued to her; but she did not know how to frame any question on the subject.  Touching the other difficulty—­the Conway Dalrymple difficulty—­she had her ideas.  The tenderness of her friendship had been trodden upon by and outraged by the rough foot of an overbearing husband, and she was ill-used.  She would obey.  It was becoming to her as a wife that she should submit.  She would give up Conway Dalrymple, and would induce him—­in spite of his violent attachment to herself—­to take a wife.  She herself would choose a wife for him.  She herself would, with suicidal hands, destroy the love of her own life, since an overbearing, brutal husband demanded that it should be destroyed.  She would sacrifice her own feelings, and do all in her power to bring Conway Dalrymple and Clara Van Siever together.  If, after that, some poet did not immortalise her friendship in Byronic verse, she certainly would not get her due.  Perhaps Conway Dalrymple would himself become a poet in order that this might be done properly.  For it must be understood that, though she expected Conway Dalrymple to marry, she expected also that he should be Byronically wretched after his marriage on account of his love for herself.

But there was certainly something wrong over and beyond the Dalrymple difficulty.  The servants were not as civil as they used to be, and her husband, when she suggested to him a little dinner-party, snubbed her most unmercifully.  The giving of dinner-parties had been his glory, and she had made the suggestion simply with the view of pleasing him.  ’If the world were going round, the wrong way, a woman would still want a party,’ he had said, sneering at her.  ’It was of you I was thinking, Dobbs,’ she replied; ‘not of myself.