Flora de Barral was not exceptionally intelligent but she was thoroughly feminine.

She would be passive (and that does not mean inanimate) in the circumstances, where the mere fact of being a woman was enough to give her an occult and supreme significance.

And she would be enduring which is the essence of woman's visible, tangible power.

Of that I was certain.

Had she not endured already?
Yet it is so true that the germ of destruction lies in wait for us mortals, even at the very source of our strength, that one may die of too much endurance as well as of too little of it.
Such was my train of thought.