Would it never end?
The lace of her gown, cautiously withdrawn through its hundred eyelet-holes, knotted itself.
"Cut it," she said, impatiently.

"Cut it." At last she was in her dressing-gown and alone.

She flung herself face downwards on the sofa.

Her attitude had the touch of artificiality which was natural to her.
The deluge had arrived, and unconsciously she met it, as she would have made a heroine meet it had she been a novelist, in a white dressing-gown and pink ribbons in a stereotyped attitude of despair on a divan.
Conscience is supposed to make cowards of us all, but it is a matter of common experience that the unimaginative are made cowards of only by being found out.
Had David qualms of conscience when Uriah fell before the besieged city?
Surely if he had he would have winced at the obvious parallel of the prophet's story about the ewe lamb.

But apparently he remained serenely obtuse till the indignant author's "Thou art the man" unexpectedly nailed him to the cross of his sin.
And so it was with Lady Newhaven.