An hour and twenty
minutes! she had no more time than that: and it was not enough for her
various preparations, though it was true that her maid had packed and
taken a box of the things chiefly needful; but the duchess had to change
her shoes and her dress, and run at bo-peep with the changes of her mind,
a sedative preface to any fatal step among women of her complexion, for
so they invite indecision to exhaust their scruples, and they let the
blood have its way. Having so short a space of time, she thought the
matter decided, and with some relief she flung despairing on the bed, and
lay down for good with her duke. In a little while her head was at work
reviewing him sternly, estimating him not less accurately than the male
moralist charitable to her sex would do. She quitted the bed, with a
spring to escape her imagined lord; and as if she had felt him to be
there, she lay down no more. A quiet life like that was flatter to her
idea than a handsomely bound big book without any print on the pages, and
without a picture. Her contemplation of it, contrasted with the life
waved to her view by the timepiece, set her whole system rageing; she
burned to fly. Providently, nevertheless, she thumped a pillow, and
threw the bedclothes into proper disorder, to inform the world that her
limbs had warmed them, and that all had been impulse with her. She then
proceeded to disrobe, murmuring to herself that she could stop now, and
could stop now, at each stage of the advance to a fresh dressing of her
person, and moralizing on her singular fate, in the mouth of an observer.
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