"After all," said Clovis, meeting him shortly afterwards at his
club, "you have this doubtful consolation, that 'tis not in
mortals to countermand success."
THE MUSIC ON THE HILL
Sylvia Seltoun ate her breakfast in the morning-room at Yessney
with a pleasant sense of ultimate victory, such as a fervent
Ironside might have permitted himself on the morrow of Worcester
fight. She was scarcely pugnacious by temperament, but belonged
to that more successful class of fighters who are pugnacious by
circumstance. Fate had willed that her life should be occupied
with a series of small struggles, usually with the odds slightly
against her, and usually she had just managed to come through
winning. And now she felt that she had brought her hardest and
certainly her most important struggle to a successful issue. To
have married Mortimer Seltoun, "Dead Mortimer" as his more
intimate enemies called him, in the teeth of the cold hostility of
his family, and in spite of his unaffected indifference to women,
was indeed an achievement that had needed some determination and
adroitness to carry through; yesterday she had brought her victory
to its concluding stage by wrenching her husband away from Town
and its group of satellite watering-places and "settling him
down," in the vocabulary of her kind, in this remote wood-girt
manor farm which was his country house.
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