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 was on Madame Volkonsky's side. And the two had begun life under much the same auspices. Madame Volkonsky, who was a clever woman in her way, was not silly enough to suppose that her present miseries had any real connection with the honors and pleasures she enjoyed. But being a shrewd observer, she saw that the excellent things of life are much more evenly divided than people commonly fancy—and she believed in a kind of inexorable fate that metes out dyspepsia and ingratitude and deceit to Dives, that the balance may be struck between him and Lazarus.

So all day she lay on the sofa, and thought about those early days of hers, and Olivia and Pembroke, and even her Aunt Sally Peyton and poor Miles and Cave, and everybody linked with that time. When she thought of Pembroke, it came upon her that he might be induced to spare her. She had never really understood Pembroke, although she had admired him intensely. If she had, things would have been very different with both of them. She never could understand her own failure with him. Of course she hated him, but love and hatred of the same person are not unfrequently found in women. She could not but hate him when she remembered that if he spared them and let them get away quietly, it would be because she was a woman, not because she was Elise Koller. But after all she would be rather pleased to get away from Washington now, if she could do so without being ruined. She wondered at her own rashness