She forgot that one of the lowest of human qualities--cunning--is
exactly the capacity which is often most largely developed in the lowest
of intellectual natures. If she had been honestly angry with her master,
she would probably have frightened him. If she had opened her mind
plainly to his view, she would have astonished him by presenting a chain
of ideas to his limited perceptions which they were not strong enough to
grasp; his curiosity would have led him to ask for an explanation; and
by practicing on that curiosity, she might have had him at her mercy. As
it was, she set her cunning against his, and the fool proved a match for
her. Noel Vanstone, to whom all large-minded motives under heaven were
inscrutable mysteries, saw the small-minded motive at the bottom of his
housekeeper's conduct with as instantaneous a penetration as if he had
been a man of the highest ability. Mrs. Lecount left him for the night,
foiled, and knowing she was foiled--left him, with the tigerish side of
her uppermost, and a low-lived longing in her elegant finger-nails to
set them in her master's face.
She was not a woman to be beaten by one defeat or by a hundred.
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