"But there are lots of stories," began Mildred.
"Thousands. But not of that damaging kind. If you had said she was having an intrigue, say, with the Emperor of Russia, it would have hurt nobody, not even the Emperor. Never mind, dear, the thing is done. We must consider how we can make the best of it. A scandal is always a dangerous thing to touch. If one denies it afterwards, if even the inventor, who believes it to be true--how ridiculous, too, of you, dear Mildred!--denies it, there will always be people who think that the denial merely confirms it. In this case it is peculiarly complicated. The great thing is that the whole invention was so silly from the start. I should have thought, dear Mildred, that you had a better imagination. But you have not. It is not your fault; you cannot help it. What shall we do, do you think?"
This old woman was not so impotent as Mildred had hoped. She had been accustomed to consider herself fairly wide awake, but it appeared that her waking moments were somnolence personified to Lady Ardingly.
"Then, I will tell you," said Lady Ardingly. "Start a scandal--you are so good at it--about yourself and Jim Spencer. Nothing circumstantial--only let it be in the air. Let people say things; there is nothing easier. Then it will appear also that you have broken with Jack. That, I tell you, will not injure him. A married man is open to damaging scandals in two ways: one through himself, one through his wife. And in Jack's case, my dear, both these doors are flung wide, and Lady Brereton enters through each, trumpeting like--like an elephant."
Lady Ardingly nodded her head at Mildred, with the air of a nurse scolding a refractory child.
"Now, do not look so disconsolate, my dear," she went on, observing Mildred's face falling as a barometer falls before a cyclone, "but just bestir yourself. You should really in future consult somebody before you embark on these efforts. You have dug a bottomless well, so I may say, at the foot of the ladder by which your friend Jack was preparing to mount. There is room--just room--to get him on to it still. But there is only one way of doing it--that is, by stopping somehow or another that very silly story you made up about his wife, and by taking very great care how you are talked about in connection with him by the wrong people--just now, perhaps, by anybody. You can do both these things by letting it be supposed that you are _intime_ with Mr. Spencer. Let us talk of something else."