She was being, she wrote, mercifully drugged by her task.
She had learned to "converse" all day long, mechanically, absently, as if in a trance.

An uneasy trance it must have been! Her worst moments were when off duty--alone in the evening, shut up in her own little room, her dulled thoughts waking up slowly till she started into the full consciousness of her position, like a person waking up in contact with something venomous--a snake, for instance--experiencing a mad impulse to fling the thing away and run off screaming to hide somewhere.
At this period of her existence Flora de Barral used to write to Mrs.
Fyne not regularly but fairly often.

I don't know how long she would have gone on "conversing" and, incidentally, helping to supervise the beautifully stocked linen closets of that well-to-do German household, if the man of it had not developed in the intervals of his avocations (he was a merchant and a thoroughly domesticated character) a psychological resemblance to the Bournemouth old lady.

It appeared that he, too, wanted to be loved.
He was not, however, of a conquering temperament--a kiss-snatching, door- bursting type of libertine.

In the very act of straying from the path of virtue he remained a respectable merchant.