When he said good-by to her under the great porch he couldn’t help asking: 

“Are your nerves of steel?”

She leaned forward in the brougham.

“If your muscles are of iron.”

“My muscles!” he said.

“Haven’t you educated them?”

“Oh—­yes.”

“And perhaps I’ve educated my nerves.”

Mrs. Chetwinde’s spirited horses began to prance and show temper.  Mrs. Clarke sat back.  As the carriage moved away, Dion saw Mrs. Chetwinde’s eyes fixed upon him.  They looked at that moment not at all vague.  If they had not been her eyes, he would have been inclined to think them piercing.  But, of course, Mrs. Chetwinde’s eyes could never be that.

“How does one educate one’s nerves, Guy?” asked Dion, as the two friends walked away.

“By being defendant in a long series of divorce cases, I should say.”

“Has Mrs. Clarke ever been in another case of this kind?”

“Good heavens, no.  If she had, even I couldn’t believe in her innocence, as I do now.”

“Then where did she get her education?”

“Where do women get things, old Dion?  It seems to me sometimes straight from God, and sometimes straight from the devil.”

Dion’s mental comment on this was, “What about Mrs. Clarke?” But he did not utter it.

Before he left Daventry, he was pledged to be in court on the last day of the case, when the verdict would be given.  He wished to go to the court again on the morrow, but the thought of Rosamund decided him not to do this; he would, he knew, feel almost ashamed in telling her that the divorce court, at this moment, fascinated him, that he longed, or almost longed, to follow the colored fires of a certain torch down further shadowy alleys of the unwise life.  He felt quite sure that Mrs. Clarke was an innocent woman, but she had certainly been very unconventional indeed in her conduct.  He remembered the almost stern strength in her husky voice when she had said “my unconventionality, which I shall never give up.”  So even this hideous and widely proclaimed scandal would not induce her to bow in the future before the conventional gods.  She really was an extraordinary woman.  What would Rosamund think of her?  If she won her case she evidently meant to know Rosamund.  Of course, there could be nothing against that.  If she lost the case, naturally there could never be any question of such an acquaintance; he knew instinctively that she would never suggest it.  Whatever she was, or was not, she was certainly a woman of the world.

That evening, when he reached home, he found Rosamund sitting in the nursery in the company of Robin and the nurse.  The window was partially open.  Rosamund believed in plenty of air for her child, and no “cosseting”; she laughed to scorn, but genially, the nurse’s prejudice against “the night air.”

“My child,” she said, “must get accustomed to night as well as day, Nurse—­and the sooner the better.”  So now “Master Robin” was played upon by a little wind from Westminster.  He seemed in no way alarmed by it.  This evening he was serene, and when his father entered the room he assumed his expression of mild inquiry, vaguely agitated his small rose-colored fists, and blew forth a welcoming bubble.