Victoria McCandless (Bella Baxter)—Duncan Wedderburn

The relationship between Victoria McCandless (Bella Baxter) and Duncan Wedderburn begins as Victoria’s attempt to test her own experience of desire, but it does not mean the same thing to both of them. She approaches Duncan as an experiment after falling in love with Archibald McCandless; Duncan, who quickly imagines marriage, understands their intimacy as a path to a lasting union. The mismatch leads to an elopement, his eventual collapse, and a connection that persists in the form of Victoria’s monthly visits to him in an asylum.

Prior Acquaintance and Courtship

Before becoming lovers, Duncan is already connected to Victoria’s household as Godwin Baxter’s legal friend. He sometimes takes her to theatres because Godwin Baxter has a horror of crowds and cannot accompany her. Victoria loves the theatre, from its pantomime chorus to Shakespeare, and these outings establish Duncan as a companion within the wider circle of her education and social life. They do not, in her account, amount to a courtship: she says she had never considered him as a lover, and that he had never considered her either.

Desire as Experiment

The immediate occasion for the affair is Victoria’s response to a kiss from Archibald McCandless. Its effect leaves her wondering whether the intense combination of power and helplessness belongs to her relationship with Archibald or might be produced by another man. She decides to find out by seducing Duncan. The decision is purposeful, but her account also stresses how little she initially considers the other people affected by it. Looking back, she calls herself selfish and says she then lacked moral imagination and intelligent sympathy.

Duncan’s expectations change with the affair. Victoria describes him as conventional and devoted to a selfish mother, and says the thought of marriage had not occurred to him before they became lovers. It occurs to him immediately afterward. He proposes an elopement, but Victoria does not understand that it involves marriage. To her, it is a pleasurable experiment and a way of discovering how suitable Archibald might be. Her account makes the disparity unmistakable: she treats the journey as a test of one relationship, while Duncan takes their intimacy as the beginning of another.

Victoria explains her plans to Godwin Baxter. He cannot teach her about love, he says, but asks her to be gentle with Duncan because Duncan does not have a strong head. He also warns that Archibald will suffer when he hears what has happened. Victoria asks whether Godwin will shut her out when she returns; he says no, though he may not be alive. Her confidence that he will survive is bound up with a mistaken belief that he invented his illness to keep women from manipulating him. The exchange places the affair within a wider household already vulnerable to separation and loss, without resolving what Victoria herself expects to find when she comes back.

Collapse and Continuing Contact

Victoria says she enjoyed Duncan while the relationship lasted and was gentle with him when he fell apart. The account does not specify the circumstances of his collapse, but it establishes a stark change in their roles: a lover who had proposed marriage becomes someone for whom she feels care and responsibility. She still visits him once a month in the lunatic asylum. In her description, he is now bright and cheerful, greeting her with a mischievous wink and a knowing grin.

Victoria suspects that Duncan’s insanity began as a pretence to avoid imprisonment for embezzling clients’ funds, but she also acknowledges that it has become real. Her uncertainty matters to the relationship’s later form. She does not present him simply as the conventional suitor she once used to answer a question about desire, nor does she erase the suspicion that his collapse began as an evasion. Instead, the monthly visits hold together affection, doubt, and a continuing awareness of the consequences of his actions.

Later Visits and Narrative Significance

In a conversation during one of those visits, Duncan asks after Victoria’s husband. When she tells him that Archibald died in 1911, Duncan clarifies that he means her other husband, using an extravagant nickname for Godwin Baxter. Victoria replies that Godwin is dead too. Duncan jokes that Godwin will never die; Victoria’s retrospective account answers the exchange with the wish that this had been true. The conversation is not evidence that Duncan has forgotten Victoria’s life. On the contrary, his teasing depends on their shared knowledge of the people who shaped it and on a familiarity that remains after their affair has ended.

The relationship’s lasting significance lies less in its duration than in the change between its beginning and its afterlife. Victoria first approaches Duncan to test whether another man can reproduce the sensations associated with Archibald; she later describes herself as gentle with him, returns regularly, and records their playful exchange. The affair does not settle into a conventional romantic partnership, and the evidence does not show a reconciliation or renewed courtship. It leaves instead an uneven but enduring connection: desire brings them together under different expectations, while care and remembered intimacy continue after the lovers’ plans have fallen apart.