Lena ignored her subtlety as she had ignored her
sulks. She had no more use for her as a confidant and spy, and Ethel
lived in a back den off Hippisley's study with her Remington, and
displayed a convenient apathy in allowing herself to be ignored.
"Really," Lena would say in the unusual moments when she thought of
her, "if it wasn't for the clicking, you wouldn't know she was there."
And as a secretary she maintained, up to the last, an admirable
efficiency.
Up to the last.
It was Hippisley's death that ended it. You know how it
happened--suddenly, of heart failure, in Paris. He'd gone there with
Furnival to get material for that book they were doing together. Lena
was literally "prostrated" with the shock; and Ethel Reeves had to go
over to Paris to bring back his papers and his body.
It was the day after the funeral that it all came out. Lena and Ethel
were sitting up together over the papers and the letters, turning out
his bureau. I suppose that, in the grand immunity his death conferred
on her, poor Lena had become provokingly possessive.
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