When her children had left her, one after the other, she sat at the window for an hour, looking at nothing, but turning over her own thoughts in her mind.
Hitherto she had expressed herself as being very angry with her daughter's lover; so angry that she had said that he was faithless, a traitor, and no gentleman.

She had called him a dissipated spendthrift, and had threatened his future wife, if ever he should have one, with every kind of misery that could fall to a woman's lot; but now she began to think of him perhaps more kindly.
She had been very angry with him;--and the more so because she had such cause to be angry with herself;--with her own lack of judgment, her own ignorance of the man's character, her own folly with reference to her daughter.

She had never asked herself whether she loved Fitzgerald--had never done so till now.

But now she knew that the sharpest blow she had received that day was the assurance that he was indifferent to herself.
She had never thought herself too old to be on an equality with him,--on such an equality in point of age as men and women feel when they learn to love each other; and therefore it had not occurred to her that he could regard her daughter as other than a child.

To Lady Desmond, Clara was a child; how then could she be more to him?
And yet now it was too plain that he had looked on Clara as a woman.