There is a certain amount of what I would politely call unscrupulousness in all of us.

Think for instance of the excellent Mrs.Fyne, who herself, and in the bosom of her family, resembled a governess of a conventional type.

Only, her mental excesses were theoretical, hedged in by so much humane feeling and conventional reserves, that they amounted to no more than mere libertinage of thought; whereas the other woman, the governess of Flora de Barral, was, as you may have noticed, severely practical--terribly practical.

No! Hers was not a rare temperament, except in its fierce resentment of repression; a feeling which like genius or lunacy is apt to drive people into sudden irrelevancy.

Hers was feminine irrelevancy.