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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 4466 ***
+
+DIANA OF THE CROSSWAYS
+
+By George Meredith
+
+1897
+
+
+
+BOOK 2.
+
+IX.       SHOWS HOW A POSITION OF DELICACY FOR A LADY AND GENTLEMAN WAS
+          MET IN SIMPLE FASHION WITHOUT HURT TO EITHER.
+X.        THE CONFLICT OF THE NIGHT
+XI.       RECOUNTS THE JOURNEY IN A CHARIOT, WITH A CERTAIN AMOUNT OF
+          DIALOGUE, AND A SMALL INCIDENT ON THE ROAD
+XII.      BETWEEN EMMA AND DIANA
+XIII.     TOUCHING THE FIRST DAYS OF HER PROBATION
+XIV.      GIVING GLIMPSES OF DIANA UNDER HER CLOUD BEFORE THE WORLD AND
+          OF HER FURTHER APPRENTICESHIP
+XV.       INTRODUCES THE HON. PERCY DACIER
+XVI.      TREATS OF A MIDNIGHT BELL, AND OF A SCENE OF EARLY MORNING
+XVII.     THE PRINCESS EGERIA
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+SHOWS HOW A POSITION OF DELICACY FOR A LADY AND GENTLEMAN WAS MET IN
+SIMPLE FASHION WITHOUT HURT TO EITHER
+
+Redworth's impulse was to laugh for very gladness of heart, as he
+proffered excuses for his tremendous alarums and in doing so, the worthy
+gentleman imagined he must have persisted in clamouring for admission
+because he suspected, that if at home, she would require a violent
+summons to betray herself.  It was necessary to him to follow his
+abashed sagacity up to the mark of his happy animation.
+
+'Had I known it was you!' said Diana, bidding him enter the passage.
+She wore a black silk mantilla and was warmly covered.
+
+She called to her maid Danvers, whom Redworth remembered: a firm woman of
+about forty, wrapped, like her mistress, in head-covering, cloak, scarf
+and shawl.  Telling her to scour the kitchen for firewood, Diana led into
+a sitting-room.  'I need not ask--you have come from Lady Dunstane,' she
+said.  'Is she well?'
+
+'She is deeply anxious.'
+
+'You are cold.  Empty houses are colder than out of doors.  You shall
+soon have a fire.'
+
+She begged him to be seated.
+
+The small glow of candle-light made her dark rich colouring orange in
+shadow.
+
+'House and grounds are open to a tenant,' she resumed.  'I say good-bye
+to them to-morrow morning.  The old couple who are in charge sleep in the
+village to-night.  I did not want them here.  You have quitted the
+Government service, I think?'
+
+'A year or so since.'
+
+'When did you return from America?'
+
+'Two days back.'
+
+'And paid your visit to Copsley immediately?'
+
+'As early as I could.'
+
+'That was true friendliness.  You have a letter for me?'
+
+'I have.'
+
+He put his hand to his pocket for the letter.
+
+'Presently,' she said.  She divined the contents, and nursed her
+resolution to withstand them.  Danvers had brought firewood and coal.
+Orders were given to her, and in spite of the opposition of the maid
+and intervention of the gentleman, Diana knelt at the grate, observing:
+
+'Allow me to do this.  I can lay and light a fire.'
+
+He was obliged to look on: she was a woman who spoke her meaning.  She
+knelt, handling paper, firewood and matches, like a housemaid.  Danvers
+proceeded on her mission, and Redworth eyed Diana in the first fire-glow.
+He could have imagined a Madonna on an old black Spanish canvas.
+
+The act of service was beautiful in gracefulness, and her simplicity in
+doing the work touched it spiritually.  He thought, as she knelt there,
+that never had he seen how lovely and how charged with mystery her
+features were; the dark large eyes full on the brows; the proud line of
+a straight nose in right measure to the bow of the lips; reposeful red
+lips, shut, and their curve of the slumber-smile at the corners.  Her
+forehead was broad; the chin of a sufficient firmness to sustain: that
+noble square; the brows marked by a soft thick brush to the temples; her
+black hair plainly drawn along her head to the knot, revealed by the
+mantilla fallen on her neck.
+
+Elegant in plainness, the classic poet would have said of her hair and
+dress.  She was of the women whose wits are quick in everything they do.
+That which was proper to her position, complexion, and the hour, surely
+marked her appearance.  Unaccountably this night, the fair fleshly
+presence over-weighted her intellectual distinction, to an observer bent
+on vindicating her innocence.  Or rather, he saw the hidden in the
+visible.
+
+Owner of such a woman, and to lose her!  Redworth pitied the husband.
+
+The crackling flames reddened her whole person.  Gazing, he remembered
+Lady Dunstane saying of her once, that in anger she had the nostrils of a
+war-horse.  The nostrils now were faintly alive under some sensitive
+impression of her musings.  The olive cheeks, pale as she stood in the
+doorway, were flushed by the fire-beams, though no longer with their
+swarthy central rose, tropic flower of a pure and abounding blood, as it
+had seemed.  She was now beset by battle.  His pity for her, and his
+eager championship, overwhelmed the spirit of compassion for the foolish
+wretched husband.  Dolt, the man must be, Redworth thought; and he asked
+inwardly, Did the miserable tyrant suppose of a woman like this, that
+she would be content to shine as a candle in a grated lanthorn?
+The generosity of men speculating upon other men's possessions is known.
+Yet the man who loves a woman has to the full the husband's jealousy
+of her good name.  And a lover, that without the claims of the alliance,
+can be wounded on her behalf, is less distracted in his homage by the
+personal luminary, to which man's manufacture of balm and incense is
+mainly drawn when his love is wounded.  That contemplation of her
+incomparable beauty, with the multitude of his ideas fluttering round it,
+did somewhat shake the personal luminary in Redworth.  He was conscious
+of pangs.  The question bit him: How far had she been indiscreet or
+wilful? and the bite of it was a keen acid to his nerves.  A woman
+doubted by her husband, is always, and even to her champions in the first
+hours of the noxious rumour, until they had solidified in confidence
+through service, a creature of the wilds, marked for our ancient running.
+Nay, more than a cynical world, these latter will be sensible of it.  The
+doubt casts her forth, the general yelp drags her down; she runs like the
+prey of the forest under spotting branches; clear if we can think so, but
+it has to be thought in devotedness: her character is abroad.  Redworth
+bore a strong resemblance to, his fellowmen, except for his power of
+faith in this woman.  Nevertheless it required the superbness of her
+beauty and the contrasting charm of her humble posture of kneeling by the
+fire, to set him on his right track of mind.  He knew and was sure of
+her.  He dispersed the unhallowed fry in attendance upon any stirring of
+the reptile part of us, to look at her with the eyes of a friend.  And if
+.  .  .  !--a little mouse of a thought scampered out of one of the
+chambers of his head and darted along the passages, fetching a sweat to
+his brows.  Well, whatsoever the fact, his heart was hers!  He hoped he
+could be charitable to women.
+
+She rose from her knees and said: 'Now, please, give me the letter.'
+
+He was entreated to excuse her for consigning him to firelight when she
+left the room.
+
+Danvers brought in a dismal tallow candle, remarking that her mistress
+had not expected visitors: her mistress had nothing but tea and bread and
+butter to offer him.  Danvers uttered no complaint of her sufferings;
+happy in being the picture of them.  'I'm not hungry,' said he.
+
+A plate of Andrew Hedger's own would not have tempted him.  The foolish
+frizzle of bacon sang in his ears as he walked from end to end of the
+room; an illusion of his fancy pricked by a frost-edged appetite.  But
+the anticipated contest with Diana checked and numbed the craving.
+
+Was Warwick a man to proceed to extremities on a mad suspicion?--What
+kind of proof had he?
+
+Redworth summoned the portrait of Mr. Warwick before him, and beheld a
+sweeping of close eyes in cloud, a long upper lip in cloud; the rest of
+him was all cloud.  As usual with these conjurations of a face, the index
+of the nature conceived by him displayed itself, and no more; but he took
+it for the whole physiognomy, and pronounced of the husband thus
+delineated, that those close eyes of the long upper lip would both
+suspect and proceed madly.
+
+He was invited by Danvers to enter the dining-room.
+
+There Diana joined him.
+
+'The best of a dinner on bread and butter is, that one is ready for
+supper soon after it,' she said, swimming to the tea-tray.  'You have
+dined?'
+
+'At the inn,' he replied.
+
+'The Three Ravens!  When my father's guests from London flooded The
+Crossways, The Three Ravens provided the overflow with beds.  On nights
+like this I have got up and scraped the frost from my window-panes to see
+them step into the old fly, singing some song of his.  The inn had a good
+reputation for hospitality in those days.  I hope they treated you well?'
+
+'Excellently,' said Redworth, taking an enormous mouthful, while his
+heart sank to see that she who smiled to encourage his eating had been
+weeping.  But she also consumed her bread and butter.
+
+'That poor maid of mine is an instance of a woman able to do things
+against the grain,' she said.  'Danvers is a foster-child of luxury.
+She loves it; great houses, plentiful meals, and the crowd of twinkling
+footmen's calves.  Yet you see her here in a desolate house, consenting
+to cold, and I know not what, terrors of ghosts! poor soul.  I have some
+mysterious attraction for her.  She would not let me come alone.
+I should have had to hire some old Storling grannam, or retain the
+tattling keepers of the house.  She loves her native country too, and
+disdains the foreigner.  My tea you may trust.'
+
+Redworth had not a doubt of it.  He was becoming a tea-taster.  The merit
+of warmth pertained to the beverage.  'I think you get your tea from
+Scoppin's, in the City,' he said.
+
+That was the warehouse for Mrs. Warwick's tea.  They conversed of Teas;
+the black, the green, the mixtures; each thinking of the attack to come,
+and the defence.  Meantime, the cut bread and butter having flown,
+Redwerth attacked the loaf.  He apologized.
+
+'Oh! pay me a practical compliment,' Diana said, and looked really happy
+at his unfeigned relish of her simple fare.
+
+She had given him one opportunity in speaking of her maid's love of
+native country.  But it came too early.
+
+'They say that bread and butter is fattening,' he remarked.
+
+'You preserve the mean,' said she.
+
+He admitted that his health was good.  For some little time, to his
+vexation at the absurdity, she kept him talking of himself.  So flowing
+was she, and so sweet the motion of her mouth in utterance, that he
+followed her lead, and he said odd things and corrected them.  He had to
+describe his ride to her.
+
+'Yes! the view of the Downs from Dewhurst,' she exclaimed.  'Or any point
+along the ridge.  Emma and I once drove there in Summer, with clotted
+cream from her dairy, and we bought fresh-plucked wortleberries, and
+stewed them in a hollow of the furzes, and ate them with ground biscuits
+and the clotted cream iced, and thought it a luncheon for seraphs.  Then
+you dropped to the road round under the sand-heights--and meditated
+railways!'
+
+'Just a notion or two.'
+
+'You have been very successful in America?'
+
+'Successful; perhaps; we exclude extremes in our calculations of the
+still problematical.'
+
+'I am sure,' said she, 'you always have faith in your calculations.'
+
+Her innocent archness dealt him a stab sharper than any he had known
+since the day of his hearing of her engagement.  He muttered of his
+calculations being human; he was as much of a fool as other men--more!
+
+'Oh! no,' said she.
+
+'Positively.'
+
+'I cannot think it.'
+
+'I know it.'
+
+'Mr. Redworth, you will never persuade me to believe it.'
+
+He knocked a rising groan on the head, and rejoined 'I hope I may not
+have to say so to-night.'
+
+Diana felt the edge of the dart.  'And meditating railways, you scored
+our poor land of herds and flocks; and night fell, and the moon sprang
+up, and on you came.  It was clever of you to find your way by the
+moonbeams.'
+
+'That's about the one thing I seem fit for!'
+
+'But what delusion is this, in the mind of a man succeeding in everything
+he does!' cried Diana, curious despite her wariness.  'Is there to be the
+revelation of a hairshirt ultimately?--a Journal of Confessions?  You
+succeeded in everything you aimed at, and broke your heart over one
+chance miss?'
+
+'My heart is not of the stuff to break,' he said, and laughed off her
+fortuitous thrust straight into it.  'Another cup, yes.  I came .  .  .'
+
+'By night,' said she, 'and cleverly found your way, and dined at The
+Three Ravens, and walked to The Crossways, and met no ghosts.'
+
+'On the contrary--or at least I saw a couple.'
+
+'Tell me of them; we breed them here.  We sell them periodically to the
+newspapers!'
+
+'Well, I started them in their natal locality.  I saw them, going down
+the churchyard, and bellowed after them with all my lungs.  I wanted
+directions to The Crossways; I had missed my way at some turning.  In an
+instant they were vapour.'
+
+Diana smiled.  'It was indeed a voice to startle delicate apparitions!
+So do roar Hyrcanean tigers.  Pyramus and Thisbe--slaying lions!  One
+of your ghosts carried a loaf of bread, and dropped it in fright; one
+carried a pound of fresh butter for home consumption.  They were in the
+churchyard for one in passing to kneel at her father's grave and kiss his
+tombstone.'
+
+She bowed her head, forgetful of her guard.
+
+The pause presented an opening.  Redworth left his chair and walked to
+the mantelpiece.  It was easier to him to speak, not facing her.
+
+'You have read Lady Dunstane's letter,' he began.
+
+She nodded.  'I have.'
+
+'Can you resist her appeal to you?'
+
+'I must.'
+
+'She is not in a condition to bear it well.  You will pardon me, Mrs.
+Warwick .  .  .'
+
+'Fully! Fully!'
+
+'I venture to offer merely practical advice.  You have thought of it all,
+but have not felt it.  In these cases, the one thing to do is to make a
+stand.  Lady Dunstane has a clear head.  She sees what has to be endured
+by you.  Consider: she appeals to me to bring you her letter.  Would she
+have chosen me, or any man, for her messenger, if it had not appeared to
+her a matter of life and death?  You count me among your friends.'
+
+'One of the truest.'
+
+'Here are two, then, and your own good sense.  For I do not believe it
+to be a question of courage.'
+
+'He has commenced.  Let him carry it out,' said Diana.
+
+Her desperation could have added the cry--And give me freedom!  That was
+the secret in her heart.  She had struck on the hope for the detested
+yoke to be broken at any cost.
+
+'I decline to meet his charges.  I despise them.  If my friends have
+faith in me--and they may!--I want nothing more.'
+
+'Well, I won't talk commonplaces about the world,' said Redworth.
+'We can none of us afford to have it against us.  Consider a moment: to
+your friends you are the Diana Merion they knew, and they will not suffer
+an injury to your good name without a struggle.  But if you fly?  You
+leave the dearest you have to the whole brunt of it.
+
+'They will, if they love me.'
+
+'They will.  But think of the shock to her.  Lady Dunstane reads you--'
+
+'Not quite.  No, not if she even wishes me to stay!' said Diana.
+
+He was too intent on his pleading to perceive a signification.
+
+'She reads you as clearly in the dark as if you were present with her.'
+
+'Oh!  why am I not ten years older!'  Diana cried, and tried to face
+round to him, and stopped paralyzed.  'Ten years older, I could discuss
+my situation, as an old woman of the world, and use my wits to defend
+myself.'
+
+'And then you would not dream of flight before it!'
+
+'No, she does not read me: no!  She saw that I might come to The
+Crossways.  She--no one but myself can see the wisdom of my holding
+aloof, in contempt of this baseness.'
+
+'And of allowing her to sink under that which your presence would arrest.
+Her strength will not support it.'
+
+'Emma!  Oh, cruel!' Diana sprang up to give play to her limbs.  She
+dropped on another chair.  'Go I must, I cannot turn back.  She saw my
+old attachment to this place.  It was not difficult to guess .  .  .
+Who but I can see the wisest course for me!'
+
+'It comes to this, that the blow aimed at you in your absence will strike
+her, and mortally,' said Redworth.
+
+'Then I say it is terrible to have a friend,' said Diana, with her bosom
+heaving.
+
+'Friendship, I fancy, means one heart between two.'
+
+His unstressed observation hit a bell in her head, and set it
+reverberating.  She and Emma had spoken, written, the very words.  She
+drew forth her Emma's letter from under her left breast, and read some
+half-blinded lines.
+
+Redworth immediately prepared to leave her to her feelings--trustier
+guides than her judgement in this crisis.
+
+'Adieu, for the night, Mrs. Warwick,' he said, and was guilty of
+eulogizing the judgement he thought erratic for the moment.  'Night is a
+calm adviser.  Let me presume to come again in the morning.  I dare not
+go back without you.'
+
+She looked up.  As they faced together each saw that the other had passed
+through a furnace, scorching enough to him, though hers was the delicacy
+exposed.  The reflection had its weight with her during the night.
+
+'Danvers is getting ready a bed for you; she is airing linen,' Diana,
+said.  But the bed was declined, and the hospitality was not pressed.
+The offer of it seemed to him significant of an unwary cordiality and
+thoughtlessness of tattlers that might account possibly for many things--
+supposing a fool or madman, or malignants, to interpret them.
+
+'Then, good night,' said she.
+
+They joined hands.  He exacted no promise that she would be present in
+the morning to receive him; and it was a consolation to her desire for
+freedom, until she reflected on the perfect confidence it implied, and
+felt as a quivering butterfly impalpably pinned.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+THE CONFLICT OF THE NIGHT
+
+Her brain was a steam-wheel throughout the night; everything that could
+be thought of was tossed, nothing grasped.
+
+The unfriendliness of the friends who sought to retain her recurred.  For
+look--to fly could not be interpreted as a flight.  It was but a stepping
+aside, a disdain of defending herself, and a wrapping herself in her
+dignity.  Women would be with her.  She called on the noblest of them to
+justify the course she chose, and they did, in an almost audible murmur.
+
+And O the rich reward.  A black archway-gate swung open to the glittering
+fields of freedom.
+
+Emma was not of the chorus.  Emma meditated as an invalid.  How often had
+Emma bewailed to her that the most, grievous burden of her malady was her
+fatal tendency to brood sickly upon human complications!  She could not
+see the blessedness of the prospect of freedom to a woman abominably
+yoked.  What if a miserable woman were dragged through mire to reach it!
+Married, the mire was her portion, whatever she might do.  That man--but
+pass him!
+
+And that other--the dear, the kind, careless, high-hearted old friend.
+He could honestly protest his guiltlessness, and would smilingly leave
+the case to go its ways.  Of this she was sure, that her decision and her
+pleasure would be his.  They were tied to the stake.  She had already
+tasted some of the mortal agony.  Did it matter whether the flames
+consumed her?
+
+Reflecting on the interview with Redworth, though she had performed her
+part in it placidly, her skin burned.  It was the beginning of tortures
+if she stayed in England.
+
+By staying to defend herself she forfeited her attitude of dignity and
+lost all chance of her reward.  And name the sort of world it is, dear
+friends, for which we are to sacrifice our one hope of freedom, that we
+may preserve our fair fame in it!
+
+Diana cried aloud, 'My freedom!' feeling as a butterfly flown out of a
+box to stretches of sunny earth beneath spacious heavens.  Her bitter
+marriage, joyless in all its chapters, indefensible where the man was
+right as well as where insensately wrong, had been imprisonment.  She
+excused him down to his last madness, if only the bonds were broken.
+Here, too, in this very house of her happiness with her father, she had
+bound herself to the man voluntarily, quite inexplicably.  Voluntarily,
+as we say.  But there must be a spell upon us at times.  Upon young women
+there certainly is.
+
+The wild brain of Diana, armed by her later enlightenment as to the laws
+of life and nature, dashed in revolt at the laws of the world when she
+thought of the forces, natural and social, urging young women to marry
+and be bound to the end.
+
+It should be a spotless world which is thus ruthless.
+
+But were the world impeccable it would behave more generously.
+
+The world is ruthless, dear friends, because the world is hypocrite!
+The world cannot afford to be magnanimous, or even just.
+
+Her dissensions with her husband, their differences of opinion, and puny
+wranglings, hoistings of two standards, reconciliations for the sake of
+decency, breaches of the truce, and his detested meanness, the man behind
+the mask; and glimpses of herself too, the half-known, half-suspected,
+developing creature claiming to be Diana, and unlike her dreamed Diana,
+deformed by marriage, irritable, acerb, rebellious, constantly
+justifiable against him, but not in her own mind, and therefore accusing
+him of the double crime of provoking her and perverting her--these were
+the troops defiling through her head while she did battle with the
+hypocrite world.
+
+One painful sting was caused by the feeling that she could have loved--
+whom?  An ideal.  Had he, the imagined but unvisioned, been her yoke-
+fellow, would she now lie raising caged-beast cries in execration of the
+yoke?  She would not now be seeing herself as hare, serpent, tigress!
+The hypothesis was reviewed in negatives: she had barely a sense of
+softness, just a single little heave of the bosom, quivering upward and
+leadenly sinking, when she glanced at a married Diana heartily mated.
+The regrets of the youthful for a life sailing away under medical
+sentence of death in the sad eyes of relatives resemble it.  She could
+have loved.  Good-bye to that!
+
+A woman's brutallest tussle with the world was upon her.  She was in the
+arena of the savage claws, flung there by the man who of all others
+should have protected her from them.  And what had she done to deserve
+it?  She listened to the advocate pleading her case; she primed him to
+admit the charges, to say the worst, in contempt of legal prudence, and
+thereby expose her transparent honesty.  The very things awakening a mad
+suspicion proved her innocence.  But was she this utterly simple person?
+Oh, no!  She was the Diana of the pride in her power of fencing with
+evil--by no means of the order of those ninny young women who realize the
+popular conception of the purely innocent.  She had fenced and kept her
+guard.  Of this it was her angry glory to have the knowledge.  But she
+had been compelled to fence.  Such are men in the world of facts, that
+when a woman steps out of her domestic tangle to assert, because it is a
+tangle, her rights to partial independence, they sight her for their
+prey, or at least they complacently suppose her accessible.  Wretched at
+home, a woman ought to bury herself in her wretchedness, else may she be
+assured that not the cleverest, wariest guard will cover her character.
+
+Against the husband her cause was triumphant.  Against herself she
+decided not to plead it, for this reason, that the preceding Court, which
+was the public and only positive one, had entirely and justly exonerated
+her.  But the holding of her hand by the friend half a minute too long
+for friendship, and the over-friendliness of looks, letters, frequency of
+visits, would speak within her.  She had a darting view of her husband's
+estimation of them in his present mood.  She quenched it; they were
+trifles, things that women of the world have to combat.  The revelation
+to a fair-minded young woman of the majority of men being naught other
+than men, and some of the friendliest of men betraying confidence under
+the excuse of temptation, is one of the shocks to simplicity which leave
+her the alternative of misanthropy or philosophy.  Diana had not the
+heart to hate her kind, so she resigned herself to pardon, and to the
+recognition of the state of duel between the sexes-active enough in her
+sphere of society.  The circle hummed with it; many lived for it.  Could
+she pretend to ignore it?  Her personal experience might have instigated
+a less clear and less intrepid nature to take advantage of the
+opportunity for playing the popular innocent, who runs about with
+astonished eyes to find herself in so hunting a world, and wins general
+compassion, if not shelter in unsuspected and unlicenced places.  There
+is perpetually the inducement to act the hypocrite before the hypocrite
+world, unless a woman submits to be the humbly knitting housewife,
+unquestioningly worshipful of her lord; for the world is ever gracious to
+an hypocrisy that pays homage to the mask of virtue by copying it; the
+world is hostile to the face of an innocence not conventionally simpering
+and quite surprised; the world prefers decorum to honesty.  'Let me be
+myself, whatever the martyrdom!' she cried, in that phase of young
+sensation when, to the blooming woman; the putting on of a mask appears
+to wither her and reduce her to the show she parades.  Yet, in common
+with her sisterhood, she owned she had worn a sort of mask; the world
+demands it of them as the price of their station.  That she had never
+worn it consentingly, was the plea for now casting it off altogether,
+showing herself as she was, accepting martyrdom, becoming the first
+martyr of the modern woman's cause--a grand position! and one imaginable
+to an excited mind in the dark, which does not conjure a critical humour,
+as light does, to correct the feverish sublimity.  She was, then, this
+martyr, a woman capable of telling the world she knew it, and of,
+confessing that she had behaved in disdain of its rigider rules,
+according to her own ideas of her immunities.  O brave!
+
+But was she holding the position by flight?  It involved the challenge
+of consequences, not an evasion of them.
+
+She moaned; her mental steam-wheel stopped; fatigue brought sleep.
+
+She had sensationally led her rebellious wits to The Crossways,
+distilling much poison from thoughts on the way; and there, for the
+luxury of a still seeming indecision, she sank into oblivion.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+RECOUNTS THE JOURNEY IN A CHARIOT, WITH A CERTAIN AMOUNT OF DIALOGUE, AND
+A SMALL INCIDENT ON THE ROAD
+
+In the morning the fight was over.  She looked at the signpost of The
+Crossways whilst dressing, and submitted to follow, obediently as a
+puppet, the road recommended by friends, though a voice within, that she
+took for the intimations of her reason, protested that they were wrong,
+that they were judging of her case in the general, and unwisely--
+disastrously for her.
+
+The mistaking of her desires for her reasons was peculiar to her
+situation.
+
+'So I suppose I shall some day see The Crossways again,' she said, to
+conceive a compensation in the abandonment of freedom.  The night's red
+vision of martyrdom was reserved to console her secretly, among the
+unopened lockers in her treasury of thoughts.  It helped to sustain her;
+and she was too conscious of things necessary for her sustainment to
+bring it to the light of day and examine it.  She had a pitiful bit of
+pleasure in the gratification she imparted to Danvers, by informing her
+that the journey of the day was backward to Copsley.
+
+'If I may venture to say so, ma'am, I am very glad,' said her maid.
+
+'You must be prepared for the questions of lawyers, Danvers.'
+
+'Oh, ma'am!  they'll get nothing out of me, and their wigs won't frighten
+me.'
+
+'It is usually their baldness that is most frightening, my poor Danvers.'
+
+'Nor their baldness, ma'am,' said the literal maid; 'I never cared for
+their heads, or them.  I've been in a Case before.'
+
+'Indeed!' exclaimed her mistress; and she had a chill.
+
+Danvers mentioned a notorious Case, adding, 'They got nothing out of me.'
+
+'In my Case you will please to speak the truth,' said Diana, and beheld
+in the looking-glass the primming of her maid's mouth.  The sight shot a
+sting.
+
+'Understand that there is to be no hesitation about telling the truth of
+what you know of me,' said Diana; and the answer was, 'No, ma'am.'
+
+For Danvers could remark to herself that she knew little, and was not a
+person to hesitate.  She was a maid of the world, with the quality of
+faithfulness, by nature, to a good mistress.
+
+Redworth's further difficulties were confined to the hiring of a
+conveyance for the travellers, and hot-water bottles, together with a
+postillion not addicted to drunkenness.  He procured a posting-chariot,
+an ancient and musty, of a late autumnal yellow unrefreshed by paint;
+the only bottles to be had were Dutch Schiedam.  His postillion,
+inspected at Storling, carried the flag of habitual inebriation on his
+nose, and he deemed it adviseable to ride the mare in accompaniment as
+far as Riddlehurst, notwithstanding the postillion's vows upon his honour
+that he was no drinker.  The emphasis, to a gentleman acquainted with his
+countrymen, was not reassuring.  He had hopes of enlisting a trustier
+fellow at Riddlehurst, but he was disappointed; and while debating upon
+what to do, for he shrank from leaving two women to the conduct of that
+inflamed troughsnout, Brisby, despatched to Storling by an afterthought
+of Lady Dunstane's, rushed out of the Riddlehurst inn taproom, and
+relieved him of the charge of the mare.  He was accommodated with a seat
+on a stool in the chariot.  'My triumphal car,' said his captive.  She
+was very amusing about her postillion; Danvers had to beg pardon for
+laughing.  'You are happy,' observed her mistress.  But Redworth laughed
+too, and he could not boast of any happiness beyond the temporary
+satisfaction, nor could she who sprang the laughter boast of that little.
+She said to herself, in the midst of the hilarity, 'Wherever I go now, in
+all weathers, I am perfectly naked!'  And remembering her readings of a
+certain wonderful old quarto book in her father's library, by an
+eccentric old Scottish nobleman, wherein the wearing of garments and
+sleeping in houses is accused as the cause of human degeneracy, she took
+a forced merry stand on her return to the primitive healthful state of
+man and woman, and affected scorn of our modern ways of dressing and
+thinking.  Whence it came that she had some of her wildest seizures of
+iridescent humour.  Danvers attributed the fun to her mistress's gladness
+in not having pursued her bent to quit the country.  Redworth saw deeper,
+and was nevertheless amazed by the airy hawk-poise and pounce-down of her
+wit, as she ranged high and low, now capriciously generalizing, now
+dropping bolt upon things of passage--the postillion jogging from rum to
+gin, the rustics baconly agape, the horse-kneed ostlers.  She touched
+them to the life in similes and phrases; and next she was aloft,
+derisively philosophizing, but with a comic afflatus that dispersed the
+sharpness of her irony in mocking laughter.  The afternoon refreshments
+at the inn of the county market-town, and the English idea of public
+hospitality, as to manner and the substance provided for wayfarers, were
+among the themes she made memorable to him.  She spoke of everything
+tolerantly, just naming it in a simple sentence, that fell with a ring
+and chimed: their host's ready acquiescence in receiving, orders, his
+contemptuous disclaimer of stuff he did not keep, his flat indifference
+to the sheep he sheared, and the phantom half-crown flickering in one eye
+of the anticipatory waiter; the pervading and confounding smell of stale
+beer over all the apartments; the prevalent, notion of bread, butter,
+tea, milk, sugar, as matter for the exercise of a native inventive
+genius--these were reviewed in quips of metaphor.
+
+'Come, we can do better at an inn or two known to me,' said Redworth.
+
+'Surely this is the best that can be done for us, when we strike them
+with the magic wand of a postillion?' said she.
+
+'It depends, as elsewhere, on the individuals entertaining us.'
+
+'Yet you admit that your railways are rapidly "polishing off" the
+individual.'
+
+'They will spread the metropolitan idea of comfort.'
+
+'I fear they will feed us on nothing but that big word.  It booms--
+a curfew bell--for every poor little light that we would read by.'
+
+Seeing their beacon-nosed postillion preparing too mount and failing in
+his jump, Redworth was apprehensive, and questioned the fellow concerning
+potation.
+
+'Lord, sir, they call me half a horse, but I can't 'bids water,' was the
+reply, with the assurance that he had not 'taken a pailful.'
+
+Habit enabled him to gain his seat.
+
+'It seems to us unnecessary to heap on coal when the chimney is afire;
+but he may know the proper course,' Diana said, convulsing Danvers; and
+there was discernibly to Redworth, under the influence of her phrases, a
+likeness of the flaming 'half-horse,' with the animals all smoking in the
+frost, to a railway engine.  'Your wrinkled centaur,' she named the man.
+Of course he had to play second to her, and not unwillingly; but he
+reflected passingly on the instinctive push of her rich and sparkling
+voluble fancy to the initiative, which women do not like in a woman, and
+men prefer to distantly admire.  English women and men feel toward the
+quick-witted of their species as to aliens, having the demerits of
+aliens-wordiness, vanity, obscurity, shallowness, an empty glitter, the
+sin of posturing.  A quick-witted woman exerting her wit is both a
+foreigner and potentially a criminal.  She is incandescent to a breath of
+rumour.  It accounted for her having detractors; a heavy counterpoise to
+her enthusiastic friends.  It might account for her husband's discontent-
+the reduction of him to a state of mere masculine antagonism.  What is
+the husband of a vanward woman?  He feels himself but a diminished man.
+The English husband of a voluble woman relapses into a dreary mute.  Ah,
+for the choice of places!  Redworth would have yielded her the loquent
+lead for the smallest of the privileges due to him who now rejected all,
+except the public scourging of her.  The conviction was in his mind that
+the husband of this woman sought rather to punish than be rid of her.
+But a part of his own emotion went to form the judgement.
+
+Furthermore, Lady Dunstane's allusion to her 'enemies' made him set down
+her growing crops of backbiters to the trick she had of ridiculing things
+English.  If the English do it themselves, it is in a professionally
+robust, a jocose, kindly way, always with a glance at the other things,
+great things, they excel in; and it is done to have the credit of doing
+it.  They are keen to catch an inimical tone; they will find occasion to
+chastise the presumptuous individual, unless it be the leader of a party,
+therefore a power; for they respect a power.  Redworth knew their
+quaintnesses; without overlooking them he winced at the acid of an irony
+that seemed to spring from aversion, and regretted it, for her sake.  He
+had to recollect that she was in a sharp-strung mood, bitterly
+surexcited; moreover he reminded himself of her many and memorable
+phrases of enthusiasm for England--Shakespeareland, as she would
+sometimes perversely term it, to sink the country in the poet.  English
+fortitude, English integrity, the English disposition to do justice to
+dependents, adolescent English ingenuousness, she was always ready to
+laud.  Only her enthusiasm required rousing by circumstances; it was less
+at the brim than her satire.  Hence she made enemies among a placable
+people.
+
+He felt that he could have helped her under happier conditions.  The
+beautiful vision she had been on the night of the Irish Ball swept before
+him, and he looked at her, smiling.
+
+'Why do you smile?' she said.
+
+'I was thinking of Mr. Sullivan Smith.'
+
+'Ah!  my dear compatriot!  And think, too, of Lord Larrian.'
+
+She caught her breath.  Instead of recreation, the names brought on a
+fit of sadness.  It deepened; shy neither smiled nor rattled any more.
+She gazed across the hedgeways at the white meadows and bare-twigged
+copses showing their last leaves in the frost.
+
+'I remember your words: "Observation is the most, enduring of the
+pleasures of life"; and so I have found it,' she said.  There was a
+brightness along her under-eyelids that caused him to look away.
+
+The expected catastrophe occurred on the descent of a cutting in the
+sand, where their cordial postillion at a trot bumped the chariot against
+the sturdy wheels of a waggon, which sent it reclining for support upon a
+beech-tree's huge intertwisted serpent roots, amid strips of brown
+bracken and pendant weeds, while he exhibited one short stump of leg, all
+boot, in air.  No one was hurt.  Diana disengaged herself from the
+shoulder of Danvers, and mildly said:
+
+'That reminds me, I forgot to ask why we came in a chariot.'
+
+Redworth was excited on her behalf, but the broken glass had done no
+damage, nor had Danvers fainted.  The remark was unintelligible to him,
+apart from the comforting it had been designed to give.  He jumped out,
+and held a hand for them to do the same.  'I never foresaw an event more
+positively,' said he.
+
+'And it was nothing but a back view that inspired you all the way,' said
+Diana.
+
+A waggoner held the horses, another assisted Redworth to right the
+chariot.  The postillion had hastily recovered possession of his official
+seat, that he might as soon as possible feel himself again where he was
+most intelligent, and was gay in stupidity, indifferent to what happened
+behind him.  Diana heard him counselling the waggoner as to the common
+sense of meeting small accidents with a cheerful soul.
+
+'Lord!' he cried, 'I been pitched a Somerset in my time, and taken up for
+dead, and that didn't beat me!'
+
+Disasters of the present kind could hardly affect such a veteran.  But he
+was painfully disconcerted by Redworth's determination not to entrust the
+ladies any farther to his guidance.  Danvers had implored for permission
+to walk the mile to the town, and thence take a fly to Copsley.  Her
+mistress rather sided with the postillion; who begged them to spare him
+the disgrace of riding in and delivering a box at the Red Lion.
+
+'What'll they say?  And they know Arthur Dance well there,' he groaned.
+'What!  Arthur!  chariotin' a box!  And me a better man to his work now
+than I been for many a long season, fit for double the journey!  A bit of
+a shake always braces me up.  I could read a newspaper right off, small
+print and all.  Come along, sir, and hand the ladies in.'
+
+Danvers vowed her thanks to Mr. Redworth for refusing.  They walked
+ahead; the postillion communicated his mixture of professional and human
+feelings to the waggoners, and walked his horses in the rear, meditating
+on the weak-heartedness of gentryfolk, and the means for escaping being
+chaffed out of his boots at the Old Red Lion, where he was to eat, drink,
+and sleep that night.  Ladies might be fearsome after a bit of a shake;
+he would not have supposed it of a gentleman.  He jogged himself into an
+arithmetic of the number of nips of liquor he had taken to soothe him on
+the road, in spite of the gentleman.  'For some of 'em are sworn enemies
+of poor men, as yonder one, ne'er a doubt.'
+
+Diana enjoyed her walk beneath the lingering brown-red of the frosty
+November sunset, with the scent of sand-earth strong in the air.
+
+'I had to hire a chariot because there was no two-horse carriage,' said
+Redworth, 'and I wished to reach Copsley as early as possible.'
+
+She replied, smiling, that accidents were fated.  As a certain marriage
+had been!  The comparison forced itself on her reflections.
+
+'But this is quite an adventure,' said she, reanimated by the brisker
+flow of her blood.  'We ought really to be thankful for it, in days when
+nothing happens.'
+
+Redworth accused her of getting that idea from the perusal of romances.
+
+'Yes, our lives require compression, like romances, to be interesting,
+and we object to the process,' she said.  'Real happiness is a state of
+dulness.  When we taste it consciously it becomes mortal--a thing of the
+Seasons.  But I like my walk.  How long these November sunsets burn, and
+what hues they have!  There is a scientific reason, only don't tell it
+me.  Now I understand why you always used to choose your holidays in
+November.'
+
+She thrilled him with her friendly recollection of his customs.
+
+'As to happiness, the looking forward is happiness,' he remarked.
+
+'Oh, the looking back! back!' she cried.
+
+'Forward!  that is life.'
+
+'And backward, death, if you will; and still at is happiness.  Death, and
+our postillion!'
+
+'Ay; I wonder why the fellow hangs to the rear,' said Redworth, turning
+about.
+
+'It's his cunning strategy, poor creature, so that he may be thought to
+have delivered us at the head of the town, for us to make a purchase or
+two, if we go to the inn on foot,' said Diana.  'We 'll let the manoeuvre
+succeed.'
+
+Redworth declared that she had a head for everything, and she was
+flattered to hear him.
+
+So passing from the southern into the western road, they saw the town-
+lights beneath an amber sky burning out sombrely over the woods of
+Copsley, and entered the town, the postillion following.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+BETWEEN EMMA AND DIANA
+
+Diana was in the arms of her friend at a late hour of the evening, and
+Danvers breathed the amiable atmosphere of footmen once more, professing
+herself perished.  This maid of the world, who could endure hardships and
+loss of society for the mistress to whom she was attached, no sooner saw
+herself surrounded by the comforts befitting her station, than she
+indulged in the luxury of a wailful dejectedness, the better to
+appreciate them.  She was unaffectedly astonished to find her outcries
+against the cold and the journeyings to and fro interpreted as a serving-
+woman's muffled comments on her mistress's behaviour.  Lady Dunstane's
+maid Bartlett, and Mrs. Bridges the housekeeper, and Foster the butler,
+contrived to let her know that they could speak an if they would; and
+they expressed their pity of her to assist her to begin the speaking.
+She bowed in acceptance of Fosters offer of a glass of wine after supper,
+but treated him and the other two immediately as though they had been
+interrogating bigwigs.
+
+'They wormed nothing out of me,' she said to her mistress at night,
+undressing her.  'But what a set they are!  They've got such comfortable
+places, they've all their days and hours for talk of the doings of their
+superiors.  They read the vilest of those town papers, and they put their
+two and two together of what is happening in and about.  And not one of
+the footmen thinks of staying, because it 's so dull; and they and the
+maids object--did one ever hear?--to the three uppers retiring, when they
+'ve done dining, to the private room to dessert.'
+
+'That is the custom?' observed her mistress.
+
+'Foster carries the decanter, ma'am, and Mrs. Bridges the biscuits, and
+Bartlett the plate of fruit, and they march out in order.'
+
+'The man at the head of the procession, probably.'
+
+'Oh yes.  And the others, though they have everything except the wine and
+dessert, don't like it.  When I was here last they were new, and hadn't a
+word against it.  Now they say it's invidious!  Lady Dunstane will be
+left without an under-servant at Copsley soon.  I was asked about your
+boxes, ma'am, and the moment I said they were at Dover, that instant all
+three peeped.  They let out a mouse to me.  They do love to talk!'
+
+Her mistress could have added, 'And you too, my good Danvers!'
+trustworthy though she knew the creature to be in the main.
+
+'Now go, and be sure you have bedclothes enough before you drop asleep,'
+she said; and Danvers directed her steps to gossip with Bartlett.
+
+Diana wrapped herself in a dressing-gown Lady Dunstane had sent her, and
+sat by the fire, thinking of the powder of tattle stored in servants'
+halls to explode beneath her: and but for her choice of roads she might
+have been among strangers.  The liking of strangers best is a curious
+exemplification of innocence.
+
+'Yes, I was in a muse,' she said, raising her head to Emma, whom she
+expected and sat armed to meet, unaccountably iron-nerved.  'I was
+questioning whether I could be quite as blameless as I fancy, if I sit
+and shiver to be in England.  You will tell me I have taken the right
+road.  I doubt it.  But the road is taken, and here I am.  But any road
+that leads me to you is homeward, my darling!'  She tried to melt,
+determining to be at least open with her.
+
+'I have not praised you enough for coming,' said Emma, when they had
+embraced again.
+
+'Praise a little your "truest friend of women."  Your letter gave the
+tug.  I might have resisted it.'
+
+'He came straight from heaven!  But, cruel Tony where is your love?'
+
+'It is unequal to yours, dear, I see.  I could have wrestled with
+anything abstract and distant, from being certain.  But here I am.'
+
+'But, my own dear girl, you never could have allowed this infamous charge
+to be undefended?'
+
+'I think so.  I've an odd apathy as to my character; rather like death,
+when one dreams of flying the soul.  What does it matter?  I should have
+left the flies and wasps to worry a corpse.  And then-good-bye gentility!
+I should have worked for my bread.  I had thoughts of America.  I fancy I
+can write; and Americans, one hears, are gentle to women.'
+
+'Ah, Tony!  there's the looking back.  And, of all women, you!'
+
+'Or else, dear-well, perhaps once on foreign soil, in a different air,
+I might--might have looked back, and seen my whole self, not shattered,
+as I feel it now, and come home again compassionate to the poor
+persecuted animal to defend her.  Perhaps that was what I was running
+away for.  I fled on the instinct, often a good thing to trust.'
+
+'I saw you at The Crossways.'
+
+'I remembered I had the dread that you would, though I did not imagine
+you would reach me so swiftly.  My going there was an instinct, too.
+I suppose we are all instinct when we have the world at our heels.
+Forgive me if I generalize without any longer the right to be included in
+the common human sum.  "Pariah" and "taboo" are words we borrow from
+barbarous tribes; they stick to me.'
+
+'My Tony, you look as bright as ever, and you speak despairingly.'
+
+'Call me enigma.  I am that to myself, Emmy.'
+
+'You are not quite yourself to your friend.'
+
+'Since the blow I have been bewildered; I see nothing upright.  It came
+on me suddenly; stunned me.  A bolt out of a clear sky, as they say.  He
+spared me a scene: There had been threats, and yet the sky was clear, or
+seemed.  When we have a man for arbiter, he is our sky.'
+
+Emma pressed her Tony's unresponsive hand, feeling strangely that her
+friend ebbed from her.
+
+'Has he .  .  .  to mislead him?' she said, colouring at the breach in
+the question.
+
+'Proofs?  He has the proofs he supposes.'
+
+'Not to justify suspicion?'
+
+'He broke open my desk and took my letters.'
+
+'Horrible!  But the letters?' Emma shook with a nervous revulsion.
+
+'You might read them.'
+
+'Basest of men!  That is the unpardonable cowardice!', exclaimed Emma.
+
+'The world will read them, dear,' said Diana, and struck herself to ice.
+She broke from the bitter frigidity in fury.  'They are letters--none
+very long--sometimes two short sentences--he wrote at any spare moment.
+On my honour, as a woman, I feel for him most.  The letters--I would bear
+any accusation rather than that exposure.  Letters of a man of his age to
+a young woman he rates too highly!
+
+The world reads them.  Do you hear it saying it could have excused her
+for that fiddle-faddle with a younger--a young lover?  And had I thought
+of a lover!  .  .  .  I had no thought of loving or being loved.  I
+confess I was flattered.  To you, Emma, I will confess .  .  .  .  You
+see the public ridicule!--and half his age, he and I would have appeared
+a romantic couple!  Confess, I said.  Well, dear, the stake is lighted
+for a trial of its effect on me.  It is this: he was never a
+dishonourable friend; but men appear to be capable of friendship with
+women only for as long as we keep out of pulling distance of that line
+where friendship ceases.  They may step on it; we must hold back a
+league.  I have learnt it.  You will judge whether he disrespects me.
+As for him, he is a man; at his worst, not one of the worst; at his best,
+better than very many.  There, now, Emma, you have me stripped and
+burning; there is my full confession.  Except for this--yes, one thing
+further--that I do rage at the ridicule, and could choose, but for you,
+to have given the world cause to revile me, or think me romantic.
+Something or somebody to suffer for would really be agreeable.  It is a
+singular fact, I have not known what this love is, that they talk about.
+And behold me marched into Smithfield!--society's heretic, if you please.
+I must own I think it hard.'
+
+Emma chafed her cold hand softly.
+
+'It is hard; I understand it,' she murmured.  'And is your Sunday visit
+to us in the list of offences?'
+
+'An item.'
+
+'You gave me a happy day.'
+
+'Then it counts for me in heaven.'
+
+'He set spies on you?'
+
+'So we may presume.'
+
+Emma went through a sphere of tenuious reflections in a flash.
+
+'He will rue it.  Perhaps now .  .  .  he may now be regretting his
+wretched frenzy.  And Tony could pardon; she has the power of pardoning
+in her heart.'
+
+'Oh!  certainly, dear.  But tell me why it is you speak to-night rather
+unlike the sedate, philosophical Emma; in a tone-well, tolerably
+sentimental?'
+
+'I am unaware of it,' said Emma, who could have retorted with a like
+reproach.  'I am anxious, I will not say at present for your happiness,
+for your peace; and I have a hope that possibly a timely word from some
+friend--Lukin or another--might induce him to consider.'
+
+'To pardon me, do you mean?' cried Diana, flushing sternly.
+
+'Not pardon.  Suppose a case of faults on both sides.'
+
+'You address a faulty person, my dear.  But do you know that you are
+hinting at a reconcilement?'
+
+'Might it not be?'
+
+'Open your eyes to what it involves.  I trust I can pardon.  Let him go
+his ways, do his darkest, or repent.  But return to the roof of the
+"basest of men," who was guilty of "the unpardonable cowardice"?  You
+expect me to be superhuman.  When I consent to that, I shall be out of my
+woman's skin, which he has branded.  Go back to him!'  She was taken with
+a shudder of head and limbs.  'No; I really have the power of pardoning,
+and I am bound to; for among my debts to him, this present exemption,
+that is like liberty dragging a chain, or, say, an escaped felon wearing
+his manacles, should count.  I am sensible of my obligation.  The price I
+pay for it is an immovable patch-attractive to male idiots, I have heard,
+and a mark of scorn to females.  Between the two the remainder of my days
+will be lively.  "Out, out, damned spot!"  But it will not.  And not on
+the hand--on the forehead!  We'll talk of it no longer.  I have sent a
+note, with an enclosure, to my lawyers.  I sell The Crossways, if I have
+the married woman's right to any scrap of property, for money to scatter
+fees.'
+
+'My purse, dear Tony!' exclaimed Emma.  'My house!  You will stay with
+me?  Why do you shake your head?  With me you are safe.'  She spied at
+the shadows in her friend's face.  'Ever since your marriage, Tony, you
+have been strange in your trick of refusing to stay with me.  And you and
+I made our friendship the pledge of a belief in eternity!  We vowed it.
+Come, I do talk sentimentally, but my heart is in it.  I beg you--all the
+reasons are with me--to make my house your home.  You will.  You know I
+am rather lonely.'
+
+Diana struggled to keep her resolution from being broken by tenderness.
+And doubtless poor Sir Lukin had learnt his lesson; still, her defensive
+instincts could never quite slumber under his roof; not because of any
+further fear that they would have to be summoned; it was chiefly owing to
+the consequences of his treacherous foolishness.  For this half-home with
+her friend thenceforward denied to her, she had accepted a protector,
+called husband--rashly, past credence, in the retrospect; but it had been
+her propelling motive; and the loathings roused by her marriage helped to
+sicken her at the idea of a lengthened stay where she had suffered the
+shock precipitating her to an act of insanity.
+
+'I do not forget you were an heiress, Emmy, and I will come to you if I
+need money to keep my head up.  As for staying, two reasons are against
+it.  If I am to fight my battle, I must be seen; I must go about--
+wherever I am received.  So my field is London.  That is obvious.
+And I shall rest better in a house where my story is not known.'
+
+Two or three questions ensued.  Diana had to fortify her fictitious
+objection by alluding to her maid's prattle of the household below;
+and she excused the hapless, overfed, idle people of those regions.
+
+To Emma it seemed a not unnatural sensitiveness.  She came to a settled
+resolve in her thoughts, as she said, 'They want a change.  London is
+their element.'
+
+Feeling that she deceived this true heart, however lightly and
+necessarily, Diana warmed to her, forgiving her at last for having netted
+and dragged her back to front the enemy; an imposition of horrors, of
+which the scene and the travelling with Redworth, the talking of her case
+with her most intimate friend as well, had been a distempering foretaste.
+
+They stood up and kissed, parting for the night.
+
+An odd world, where for the sin we have not participated in we must fib
+and continue fibbing, she reflected.  She did not entirely cheat her
+clearer mind, for she perceived that her step in flight had been urged
+both by a weak despondency and a blind desperation; also that the world
+of a fluid civilization is perforce artificial.  But her mind was in the
+background of her fevered senses, and when she looked in the glass and
+mused on uttering the word, 'Liar!' to the lovely image, her senses were
+refreshed, her mind somewhat relieved, the face appeared so sovereignly
+defiant of abasement.
+
+Thus did a nature distraught by pain obtain some short lull of repose.
+Thus, moreover, by closely reading herself, whom she scourged to excess
+that she might in justice be comforted, she gathered an increasing
+knowledge of our human constitution, and stored matter for the brain.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+TOUCHING THE FIRST DAYS OF HER PROBATION
+
+The result of her sleeping was, that Diana's humour, locked up overnight,
+insisted on an excursion, as she lay with half-buried head and open
+eyelids, thinking of the firm of lawyers she had to see; and to whom,
+and to the legal profession generally, she would be, under outward
+courtesies, nothing other than 'the woman Warwick.'  She pursued the
+woman Warwick unmercifully through a series of interviews with her
+decorous and crudely-minded defenders; accurately perusing them behind
+their senior staidness.  Her scorching sensitiveness sharpened her
+intelligence in regard to the estimate of discarded wives entertained by
+men of business and plain men of the world, and she drove the woman
+Warwick down their ranks, amazed by the vision of a puppet so unlike to
+herself in reality, though identical in situation.  That woman, reciting
+her side of the case, gained a gradual resemblance to Danvers; she spoke
+primly; perpetually the creature aired her handkerchief; she was bent on
+softening those sugarloaves, the hard business-men applying to her for
+facts.  Facts were treated as unworthy of her; mere stuff of the
+dustheap, mutton-bones, old shoes; she swam above them in a cocoon of her
+spinning, sylphidine, unseizable; and between perplexing and mollifying
+the slaves of facts, she saw them at their heels, a tearful fry, abjectly
+imitative of her melodramatic performances.  The spectacle was presented
+of a band of legal gentlemen vociferating mightily for swords and the
+onset, like the Austrian empress's Magyars, to vindicate her just and
+holy cause.  Our Law-courts failing, they threatened Parliament, and for
+a last resort, the country!  We are not going to be the woman Warwick
+without a stir, my brethren.
+
+Emma, an early riser that morning, for the purpose of a private
+consultation with Mr. Redworth, found her lying placidly wakeful, to
+judge by appearances.
+
+'You have not slept, my dear child?'
+
+'Perfectly,' said Diana, giving her hand and offering the lips.  'I'm
+only having a warm morning bath in bed,' she added, in explanation of a
+chill moisture that the touch of her exposed skin betrayed; for whatever
+the fun of the woman Warwick, there had been sympathetic feminine horrors
+in the frame of the sentient woman.
+
+Emma fancied she kissed a quiet sufferer.  A few remarks very soon set
+her wildly laughing.  Both were laughing when Danvers entered the room,
+rather guilty, being late; and the sight of the prim-visaged maid she had
+been driving among the lawyers kindled Diana's comic imagination to such
+a pitch that she ran riot in drolleries, carrying her friend headlong on
+the tide.
+
+'I have not laughed so much since you were married,' said Emma.
+
+'Nor I, dear; proving that the bar to it was the ceremony,' said Diana.
+
+She promised to remain at Copsley three days.  'Then for the campaign in
+Mr. Redworth's metropolis.  I wonder whether I may ask him to get me
+lodgings: a sitting-room and two bedrooms.  The Crossways has a board up
+for letting.  I should prefer to be my own tenant; only it would give me
+a hundred pounds more to get a substitute's money.  I should like to be
+at work writing instantly.  Ink is my opium, and the pen my nigger, and
+he must dig up gold for me.  It is written.  Danvers, you can make ready
+to dress me when I ring.'
+
+Emma helped the beautiful woman to her dressing-gown and the step from
+her bed.  She had her thoughts, and went down to Redworth at the
+breakfast-table, marvelling that any husband other than a madman could
+cast such a jewel away.  The material loveliness eclipses intellectual
+qualities in such reflections.
+
+'He must be mad,' she said, compelled to disburden herself in a congenial
+atmosphere; which, however, she infrigidated by her overflow of
+exclamatory wonderment--a curtain that shook voluminous folds, luring
+Redworth to dreams of the treasure forfeited.  He became rigidly
+practical.
+
+'Provision will have to be made for her.  Lukin must see Mr. Warwick.
+She will do wisely to stay with friends in town, mix in company.  Women
+are the best allies for such cases.  Who are her solicitors?'
+
+'They are mine: Braddock, Thorpe, and Simnel.'
+
+'A good firm.  She is in safe hands with them.  I dare say they may come
+to an arrangement.'
+
+'I should wish it.  She will never consent.'
+
+Redworth shrugged.  A woman's 'never' fell far short of outstripping the
+sturdy pedestrian Time, to his mind.
+
+Diana saw him drive off to catch the coach in the valley, regulated to
+meet the train, and much though she liked him, she was not sorry that he
+had gone.  She felt the better clad for it.  She would have rejoiced to
+witness the departure on wings of all her friends, except Emma, to whom
+her coldness overnight had bound her anew warmly in contrition.  And yet
+her friends were well-beloved by her; but her emotions were distraught.
+
+Emma told her that Mr. Redworth had undertaken to hire a suite of
+convenient rooms, and to these she looked forward, the nest among
+strangers, where she could begin to write, earning bread: an idea that,
+with the pride of independence, conjured the pleasant morning smell of a
+bakery about her.
+
+She passed three peaceable days at Copsley, at war only with the luxury
+of the house.  On the fourth, a letter to Lady Dunstane from Redworth
+gave the address of the best lodgings he could find, and Diana started
+for London.
+
+She had during a couple of weeks, besides the first fresh exercising of
+her pen, as well as the severe gratification of economy, a savage
+exultation in passing through the streets on foot and unknown.  Save for
+the plunges into the office of her solicitors, she could seem to herself
+a woman who had never submitted to the yoke.  What a pleasure it was,
+after finishing a number of pages, to start Eastward toward the lawyer-
+regions, full of imaginary cropping incidents, and from that churchyard
+Westward, against smoky sunsets, or in welcome fogs, an atom of the
+crowd!  She had an affection for the crowd.  They clothed her.  She
+laughed at the gloomy forebodings of Danvers concerning the perils
+environing ladies in the streets after dark alone.  The lights in the
+streets after dark and the quick running of her blood, combined to strike
+sparks of fancy and inspirit the task of composition at night.  This new,
+strange, solitary life, cut off from her adulatory society, both by the
+shock that made the abyss and by the utter foreignness, threw her in upon
+her natural forces, recasting her, and thinning away her memory of her
+past days, excepting girlhood, into the remote.  She lived with her
+girlhood as with a simple little sister.  They were two in one, and she
+corrected the dreams of the younger, protected and counselled her very
+sagely, advising her to love Truth and look always to Reality for her
+refreshment.  She was ready to say, that no habitable spot on our planet
+was healthier and pleasanter than London.  As to the perils haunting the
+head of Danvers, her experiences assured her of a perfect immunity from
+them; and the maligned thoroughfares of a great city, she was ready to
+affirm, contrasted favourably with certain hospitable halls.
+
+The long-suffering Fates permitted her for a term to enjoy the generous
+delusion.  Subsequently a sweet surprise alleviated the shock she had
+sustained.  Emma Dunstane's carriage was at her door, and Emma entered
+her sitting-room, to tell her of having hired a house in the
+neighbourhood, looking on the park.  She begged to have her for guest,
+sorrowfully anticipating the refusal.  At least they were to be near one
+another.
+
+'You really like this life in lodgings?' asked Emma, to whom the stiff
+furniture and narrow apartments were a dreariness, the miserably small
+fire of the sitting-room an aspect of cheerless winter.
+
+'I do,' said Diana; 'yes,' she added with some reserve, and smiled at her
+damped enthusiasm, 'I can eat when I like, walk, work--and I am working!
+My legs and my pen demand it.  Let me be independent!  Besides, I begin
+to learn something of the bigger world outside the one I know, and I
+crush my mincing tastes.  In return for that, I get a sense of strength
+I had not when I was a drawing-room exotic.  Much is repulsive.  But I am
+taken with a passion for reality.'
+
+They spoke of the lawyers, and the calculated period of the trial; of the
+husband too, in his inciting belief in the falseness of his wife.  'That
+is his excuse,' Diana said, her closed mouth meditatively dimpling the
+comers over thoughts of his grounds for fury.  He had them, though none
+for the incriminating charge.  The Sphinx mouth of the married woman at
+war and at bay must be left unriddled.  She and the law differed in their
+interpretation of the dues of wedlock.
+
+But matters referring to her case were secondary with Diana beside the
+importance of her storing impressions.  Her mind required to hunger for
+something, and this Reality which frequently she was forced to loathe,
+she forced herself proudly to accept, despite her youthfulness.  Her
+philosophy swallowed it in the lump, as the great serpent his meal; she
+hoped to digest it sleeping likewise.  Her visits of curiosity to the Law
+Courts, where she stood spying and listening behind a veil, gave her a
+great deal of tough substance to digest.  There she watched the process
+of the tortures to be applied to herself, and hardened her senses for the
+ordeal.  She saw there the ribbed and shanked old skeleton world on which
+our fair fleshly is moulded.  After all, your Fool's Paradise is not a
+garden to grow in.  Charon's ferry-boat is not thicker with phantoms.
+They do not live in mind or soul.  Chiefly women people it: a certain
+class of limp men; women for the most part: they are sown there.  And put
+their garden under the magnifying glass of intimacy, what do we behold?
+A world not better than the world it curtains, only foolisher.
+
+Her conversations with Lady Dunstane brought her at last to the point of
+her damped enthusiasm.  She related an incident or two occurring in her
+career of independence, and they discussed our state of civilization
+plainly and gravely, save for the laughing peals her phrases occasionally
+provoked; as when she named the intruders and disturbers of solitarily-
+faring ladies, 'Cupid's footpads.'  Her humour was created to swim on
+waters where a prescribed and cultivated prudery should pretend to be
+drowning.
+
+'I was getting an exalted idea of English gentlemen, Emmy.  "Rich and
+rare were the gems she wore."  I was ready to vow that one might traverse
+the larger island similarly respected.  I praised their chivalry.
+I thought it a privilege to live in such a land.  I cannot describe to
+you how delightful it was to me to walk out and home generally protected.
+I might have been seriously annoyed but that one of the clerks-
+"articled," he called himself--of our lawyers happened to be by.
+He offered to guard me, and was amusing with his modest tiptoe air.
+No, I trust to the English common man more than ever.  He is a man of
+honour.  I am convinced he is matchless in any other country, except
+Ireland.  The English gentleman trades on his reputation.'
+
+He was condemned by an afflicted delicacy, the sharpest of critical
+tribunals.
+
+Emma bade her not to be too sweeping from a bad example.
+
+'It is not a single one,' said Diana.  'What vexes me and frets me is,
+that I must be a prisoner, or allow Danvers to mount guard.  And I can't
+see the end of it.  And Danvers is no magician.  She seems to know her
+countrymen, though.  She warded one of them off, by saying to me: "This
+is the crossing, my lady."  He fled.'
+
+Lady Dunstane affixed the popular title to the latter kind of gentleman.
+She was irritated on her friend's behalf, and against the worrying of her
+sisterhood, thinking in her heart, nevertheless, that the passing of a
+face and figure like Diana's might inspire honourable emotions, pitiable
+for being hapless.
+
+'If you were with me, dear, you would have none of these annoyances,' she
+said, pleading forlornly.
+
+Diana smiled to herself.  'No!  I should relapse into softness.  This
+life exactly suits my present temper.  My landlady is respectful and
+attentive; the little housemaid is a willing slave; Danvers does not
+despise them pugnaciously; they make a home for me, and I am learning
+daily.  Do you know, the less ignorant I become, the more considerate I
+am for the ignorance of others--I love them for it.'  She squeezed Emma's
+hand with more meaning than her friend apprehended.  'So I win my
+advantage from the trifles I have to endure.  They are really trifles,
+and I should once have thought them mountains!'
+
+For the moment Diana stipulated that she might not have to encounter
+friends or others at Lady Dunstane's dinner-table, and the season not
+being favourable to those gatherings planned by Lady Dunstane in her
+project of winning supporters, there was a respite, during which Sir
+Lukin worked manfully at his three Clubs to vindicate Diana's name from
+the hummers and hawers, gaining half a dozen hot adherents, and a body of
+lukewarm, sufficiently stirred to be desirous to see the lady.  He worked
+with true champion zeal, although an interview granted him by the husband
+settled his opinion as to any possibility of the two ever coming to
+terms.  Also it struck him that if he by misadventure had been a woman
+and the wife of such a fellow, by Jove!  .  .  .his apostrophe to the
+father of the gods of pagandom signifying the amount of matter Warwick
+would have had reason to complain of in earnest.  By ricochet his
+military mind rebounded from his knowledge of himself to an ardent, faith
+in Mrs. Warwick's innocence; for, as there was no resemblance between
+them, there must, he deduced, be a difference in their capacity for
+enduring the perpetual company of a prig, a stick, a petrified poser.
+Moreover, the novel act of advocacy, and the nature of the advocacy, had
+effect on him.  And then he recalled the scene in the winter beech-woods,
+and Diana's wild-deer eyes; her, perfect generosity to a traitor and
+fool.  How could he have doubted her?  Glimpses of the corrupting cause
+for it partly penetrated his density: a conqueror of ladies, in mid-
+career, doubts them all.  Of course he had meant no harm, nothing worse
+than some petty philandering with the loveliest woman of her time.  And,
+by Jove! it was worth the rebuff to behold the Beauty in her wrath.
+
+The reflections of Lothario, however much tending tardily to do justice
+to a particular lady, cannot terminate wholesomely.  But he became a
+gallant partisan.  His portrayal of Mr. Warwick to his wife and his
+friends was fine caricature.  'The fellow had his hand up at my first
+word--stood like a sentinel under inspection.  "Understand, Sir Lukin,
+that I receive you simply as an acquaintance.  As an intermediary,
+permit me to state that you are taking superfluous trouble.  The case
+must proceed.  It is final.  She is at liberty, in the meantime, to draw
+on my bankers for the provision she may need, at the rate of five hundred
+pounds per annum."  He spoke of "the lady now bearing my name."  He was
+within an inch of saying "dishonouring."  I swear I heard the "dis,"
+and he caught himself up.  He "again declined any attempt towards
+reconciliation."  It could "only be founded on evasion of the truth to
+be made patent on the day of trial."  Half his talk was lawyers' lingo.
+The fellow's teeth looked like frost.  If Lot's wife had a brother, his
+name's Warwick.  How Diana Merion, who could have had the pick of the
+best of us, ever came to marry a fellow like that, passes my
+comprehension, queer creatures as women are!  He can ride; that's about
+all he can do.  I told him Mrs. Warwick had no thought of reconciliation.
+"Then, Sir Lukin, you will perceive that we have no standpoint for a
+discussion."  I told him the point was, for a man of honour not to drag
+his wife before the public, as he had no case to stand on--less than
+nothing.  You should have seen the fellow's face.  He shot a sneer up to
+his eyelids, and flung his head back.  So I said, "Good-day."  He marches
+me to the door, "with his compliments to Lady Dunstane."  I could have
+floored him for that.  Bless my soul, what fellows the world is made of,
+when here's a man, calling himself a gentleman, who, just because he
+gets in a rage with his wife for one thing or another--and past all
+competition the handsomest woman of her day, and the cleverest, the
+nicest, the best of the whole boiling--has her out for a public
+horsewhipping, and sets all the idiots of the kingdom against her!
+I tried to reason with him.  He made as if he were going to sleep
+standing.'
+
+Sir Lukin gratified Lady Dunstane by his honest championship of Diana.
+And now, in his altered mood (the thrice indebted rogue was just cloudily
+conscious of a desire to propitiate his dear wife by serving her friend),
+he began a crusade against the scandal-newspapers, going with an Irish
+military comrade straight to the editorial offices, and leaving his card
+and a warning that the chastisement for print of the name of the lady in
+their columns would be personal and condign.  Captain Carew Mahony,
+albeit unacquainted with Mrs. Warwick, had espoused her cause.  She was
+a woman, she was an Irishwoman, she was a beautiful woman.  She had,
+therefore, three positive claims on him as a soldier and a man.  Other
+Irish gentlemen, animated by the same swelling degrees, were awaking to
+the intimation that they might be wanted.  Some words were dropped here
+and there by General Lord Larrian: he regretted his age and infirmities.
+A goodly regiment for a bodyguard might have been selected to protect her
+steps in the public streets; when it was bruited that the General had
+sent her a present of his great Newfoundland dog, Leander, to attend on
+her and impose a required respect.  But as it chanced that her address
+was unknown to the volunteer constabulary, they had to assuage their
+ardour by thinking the dog luckier than they.
+
+The report of the dog was a fact.  He arrived one morning at Diana's
+lodgings, with a soldier to lead him, and a card to introduce:--the
+Hercules of dogs, a very ideal of the species, toweringly big,
+benevolent, reputed a rescuer of lives, disdainful of dog-fighting,
+devoted to his guardian's office, with a majestic paw to give and the
+noblest satisfaction in receiving caresses ever expressed by mortal male
+enfolded about the head, kissed, patted, hugged, snuggled, informed that
+he was his new mistress's one love and darling.
+
+She despatched a thrilling note of thanks to Lord Larrian, sure of her
+touch upon an Irish heart.
+
+The dog Leander soon responded to the attachment of a mistress enamoured
+of him.  'He is my husband,' she said to Emma, and started a tear in the
+eyes of her smiling friend; 'he promises to trust me, and never to have
+the law of me, and to love my friends as his own; so we are certain to
+agree.'  In rain, snow, sunshine, through the parks and the streets, he
+was the shadow of Diana, commanding, on the whole, apart from some
+desperate attempts to make him serve as introducer, a civilized behaviour
+in the legions of Cupid's footpads.  But he helped, innocently enough, to
+create an enemy.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+GIVING GLIMPSES OF DIANA UNDER HER CLOUD BEFORE THE WORLD AND OF HER
+FURTHER APPRENTICESHIP
+
+As the day of her trial became more closely calculable, Diana's
+anticipated alarms receded with the deadening of her heart to meet the
+shock.  She fancied she had put on proof-armour, unconscious that it was
+the turning of the inward flutterer to steel, which supplied her cuirass
+and shield.  The necessity to brave society, in the character of honest
+Defendant, caused but a momentary twitch of the nerves.  Her heart beat
+regularly, like a serviceable clock; none of her faculties abandoned her
+save songfulness, and none belied her, excepting a disposition to
+tartness almost venomous in the sarcastic shafts she let fly at friends
+interceding with Mr. Warwick to spare his wife, when she had determined
+to be tried.  A strange fit of childishness overcame her powers of
+thinking, and was betrayed in her manner of speaking, though--to herself
+her dwindled humour allowed her to appear the towering Britomart.  She
+pouted contemptuously on hearing that a Mr. Sullivan Smith (a remotely
+recollected figure) had besought Mr. Warwick for an interview, and gained
+it, by stratagem, 'to bring the man to his senses': but an ultra-Irishman
+did not compromise her battle-front, as the busybody supplications of a
+personal friend like Mr. Redworth did; and that the latter, without
+consulting her, should be 'one of the plaintive crew whining about the
+heels of the Plaintiff for a mercy she disdained and rejected' was bitter
+to her taste.
+
+'He does not see that unless I go through the fire there is no
+justification for this wretched character of mine!' she exclaimed.
+Truce, treaty, withdrawal, signified publicly pardon, not exoneration by
+any means; and now that she was in armour she had no dread of the public.
+So she said.  Redworth's being then engaged upon the canvass of a
+borough, added to the absurdity of his meddling with the dilemmas of a
+woman.  'Dear me, Emma! think of stepping aside from the parliamentary
+road to entreat a husband to relent, and arrange the domestic alliance of
+a contrary couple!  Quixottry is agreeable reading, a silly performance.'
+Lady Dunstane pleaded his friendship.  She had to quit the field where
+such darts were showering.
+
+The first dinner-party was aristocratic, easy to encounter.  Lord and
+Lady Crane, Lady Pennon, Lord and Lady Esquart, Lord Larrian, Mr. and
+Mrs. Montvert of Halford Manor, Lady Singleby, Sir Walter Capperston
+friends, admirers of Diana; patrons, in the phrase of the time, of her
+father, were the guests.  Lady Pennon expected to be amused, and was
+gratified, for Diana had only to open her mouth to set the great lady
+laughing.  She petitioned to have Mrs. Warwick at her table that day
+week, because the marquis was dying to make her acquaintance, and begged
+to have all her sayings repeated to him; vowed she must be salt in the
+desert.  'And remember, I back you through thick and thin,' said Lady
+Pennon.  To which Diana replied: 'If I am salt in the desert, you are the
+spring'; and the old lady protested she must put that down for her book.
+The witty Mrs. Warwick, of whom wit was expected, had many incitements to
+be guilty of cheap wit; and the beautiful Mrs. Warwick, being able to
+pass anything she uttered, gave good and bad alike, under the impulsion
+to give out something, that the stripped and shivering Mrs. Warwick might
+find a cover in applause.  She discovered the social uses of cheap wit;
+she laid ambushes for anecdotes, a telling form of it among a people of
+no conversational interlocution, especially in the circles depending for
+dialogue upon perpetual fresh supplies of scandal; which have plentiful
+crops, yet not sufficient.  The old dinner and supper tables at The
+Crossways furnished her with an abundant store; and recollection failing,
+she invented.  Irish anecdotes are always popular in England, as
+promoting, besides the wholesome shake of the sides, a kindly sense of
+superiority.  Anecdotes also are portable, unlike the lightning flash,
+which will not go into the pocket; they can be carried home, they are
+disbursable at other tables.  These were Diana's weapons.  She was
+perforce the actress of her part.
+
+In happier times, when light of heart and natural, her vogue had not been
+so enrapturing.  Doubtless Cleopatra in her simple Egyptian uniform would
+hardly have won such plaudits as her stress of barbaric Oriental
+splendours evoked for her on the swan and serpent Nile-barge--not from
+posterity at least.  It is a terrible decree, that all must act who would
+prevail; and the more extended the audience, the greater need for the
+mask and buskin.
+
+From Lady Pennon's table Diana passed to Lady Crane's, Lady Esquart's,
+Lady Singleby's, the Duchess of Raby's, warmly clad in the admiration she
+excited.  She appeared at Princess Therese Paryli's first ball of the
+season, and had her circle, not of worshippers only.  She did not dance.
+The princess, a fair Austrian, benevolent to her sisterhood, an admirer
+of Diana's contrasting complexion, would have had her dance once in a
+quadrille of her forming, but yielded to the mute expression of the
+refusal.  Wherever Mrs. Warwick went, her arts of charming were addressed
+to the women.  Men may be counted on for falling bowled over by a
+handsome face and pointed tongue; women require some wooing from their
+ensphered and charioted sister, particularly if she is clouded; and old
+women--excellent buttresses--must be suavely courted.  Now, to woo the
+swimming matron and court the settled dowager, she had to win forgiveness
+for her beauty; and this was done, easily done, by forbearing to angle
+with it in the press of nibblers.  They ranged about her, individually
+unnoticed.  Seeming unaware of its effect where it kindled, she smote a
+number of musical female chords, compassion among them.  A general grave
+affability of her eyes and smiles was taken for quiet pleasure in the
+scene.  Her fitful intentness of look when conversing with the older
+ladies told of the mind within at work upon what they said, and she was
+careful that plain dialogue should make her comprehensible to them.
+Nature taught her these arts, through which her wit became extolled
+entirely on the strength of her reputation, and her beauty did her
+service by never taking aim abroad.  They are the woman's arts of self-
+defence, as legitimately and honourably hers as the manful use of the
+fists with a coarser sex.  If it had not been nature that taught her the
+practice of them in extremity, the sagacious dowagers would have seen
+brazenness rather than innocence--or an excuseable indiscretion--in the
+part she was performing.  They are not lightly duped by one of their sex.
+Few tasks are more difficult than for a young woman under a cloud to
+hoodwink old women of the world.  They are the prey of financiers, but
+Time has presented them a magic ancient glass to scan their sex in.
+
+At Princess Paryli's Ball two young men of singular elegance were
+observed by Diana, little though she concentered her attention on any
+figures of the groups.  She had the woman's faculty (transiently bestowed
+by perfervid jealousy upon men) of distinguishing minutely in the calmest
+of indifferent glances.  She could see without looking; and when her eyes
+were wide they had not to dwell to be detective.  It did not escape her
+that the Englishman of the two hurried for the chance of an introduction,
+nor that he suddenly, after putting a question to a man beside him,
+retired.  She spoke of them to Emma as they drove home.  'The princess's
+partner in the first quadrille .  .  .  Hungarian, I suppose?  He was
+like a Tartar modelled by a Greek: supple as the Scythian's bow, braced
+as the string!  He has the air of a born horseman, and valses perfectly.
+I won't say he was handsomer than a young Englishman there, but he had
+the advantage of soldierly training.  How different is that quick springy
+figure from our young men's lounging style!  It comes of military
+exercise and discipline.'
+
+'That was Count Jochany, a cousin of the princess, and a cavalry
+officer,' said Emma.  'You don't know the other?  I am sure the one you
+mean must be Percy Dacier.'
+
+His retiring was explained: the Hon. Percy Dacier was the nephew of Lord
+Dannisburgh, often extolled to her as the promising youngster of his day,
+with the reserve that he wasted his youth: for the young gentleman was
+decorous and studious; ambitious, according to report; a politician
+taking to politics much too seriously and exclusively to suit his uncle's
+pattern for the early period of life.  Uncle and nephew went their
+separate ways, rarely meeting, though their exchange of esteem was
+cordial.
+
+Thinking over his abrupt retirement from the crowded semicircle, Diana
+felt her position pinch her, she knew not why.
+
+Lady Dunstane was as indefatigable by day as by night in the business of
+acting goddess to her beloved Tony, whom she assured that the service,
+instead of exhausting, gave her such healthfulness as she had imagined
+herself to have lost for ever.  The word was passed, and invitations
+poured in to choice conversational breakfasts, private afternoon
+concerts, all the humming season's assemblies.  Mr. Warwick's treatment
+of his wife was taken by implication for lunatic; wherever she was heard
+or seen, he had no case; a jury of some hundreds of both sexes, ready to
+be sworn, pronounced against him.  Only the personal enemies of the lord
+in the suit presumed to doubt, and they exercised the discretion of a
+minority.
+
+But there is an upper middle class below the aristocratic, boasting an
+aristocracy of morals, and eminently persuasive of public opinion, if not
+commanding it.  Previous to the relaxation, by amendment, of a certain
+legal process, this class was held to represent the austerity of the
+country.  At present a relaxed austerity is represented; and still the
+bulk of the members are of fair repute, though not quite on the level of
+their pretensions.  They were then, while more sharply divided from the
+titular superiors they are socially absorbing, very powerful to brand a
+woman's character, whatever her rank might be; having innumerable
+agencies and avenues for that high purpose, to say nothing of the
+printing-press.  Lady Dunstane's anxiety to draw them over to the cause
+of her friend set her thinking of the influential Mrs. Cramborne Wathin,
+with whom she was distantly connected; the wife of a potent serjeant-at-
+law fast mounting to the Bench and knighthood; the centre of a circle,
+and not strangely that, despite her deficiency in the arts and graces,
+for she had wealth and a cook, a husband proud of his wine-cellar, and
+the ambition to rule; all the rewards, together with the expectations, of
+the virtuous.  She was a lady of incisive features bound in stale
+parchment.  Complexion she had none, but she had spotlessness of skin,
+and sons and daughters just resembling her, like cheaper editions of a
+precious quarto of a perished type.  You discerned the imitation of the
+type, you acknowledged the inferior compositor.  Mr. Cramborne Wathin was
+by birth of a grade beneath his wife; he sprang (behind a curtain of
+horror) from tradesmen.  The Bench was in designation for him to wash out
+the stain, but his children suffered in large hands and feet, short legs,
+excess of bone, prominences misplaced.  Their mother inspired them
+carefully with the religion she opposed to the pretensions of a nobler
+blood, while instilling into them that the blood they drew from her was
+territorial, far above the vulgar.  Her appearance and her principles
+fitted her to stand for the Puritan rich of the period, emerging by the
+aid of an extending wealth into luxurious worldliness, and retaining the
+maxims of their forefathers for the discipline of the poor and erring.
+
+Lady Dunstane called on her, ostensibly to let her know she had taken a
+house in town for the season, and in the course of the chat Mrs.
+Cramborne Wathin was invited to dinner.  'You will meet my dear friend,
+Mrs. Warwick,' she said, and the reply was: 'Oh, I have heard of her.'
+
+The formal consultation with Mr. Cramborne Wathin ended in an agreement
+to accept Lady Dunstane's kind invitation.
+
+Considering her husband's plenitude of old legal anecdotes, and her own
+diligent perusal of the funny publications of the day, that she might be
+on the level of the wits and celebrities she entertained, Mrs. Cramborne
+Wathin had a right to expect the leading share in the conversation to
+which she was accustomed.  Every honour was paid to them; they met
+aristocracy in the persons of Lord Larrian, of Lady Rockden, Colonel
+Purlby, the Pettigrews, but neither of them held the table for a moment;
+the topics flew, and were no sooner up than down; they were unable to get
+a shot.  They had to eat in silence, occasionally grinning, because a
+woman labouring under a stigma would rattle-rattle, as if the laughter of
+the company were her due, and decency beneath her notice.  Some one
+alluded to a dog of Mrs. Warwick's, whereupon she trips out a story of
+her dog's amazing intelligence.
+
+'And pray,' said Mrs. Cramborne Wathin across the table, merely to slip
+in a word, 'what is the name of this wonderful dog?'
+
+'His name is Leander,' said Diana.
+
+'Oh, Leander.  I don't think I hear myself calling to a dog in a name of
+three syllables.  Two at the most.'
+
+No, so I call Hero!  if I want him to come immediately,' said Diana, and
+the gentlemen, to Mrs. Cramborne Wathin's astonishment, acclaimed it.
+Mr. Redworth, at her elbow, explained the point, to her disgust.  .  .
+
+That was Diana's offence.
+
+If it should seem a small one, let it be remembered that a snub was
+intended, and was foiled; and foiled with an apparent simplicity, enough
+to exasperate, had there been no laughter of men to back the countering
+stroke.  A woman under a cloud, she talked, pushed to shine; she would be
+heard, would be applauded.  Her chronicler must likewise admit the error
+of her giving way to a petty sentiment of antagonism on first beholding
+Mrs. Cramborne Wathin, before whom she at once resolved to be herself,
+for a holiday, instead of acting demurely to conciliate.  Probably it was
+an antagonism of race, the shrinking of the skin from the burr.  But when
+Tremendous Powers are invoked, we should treat any simple revulsion of
+our blood as a vice.  The Gods of this world's contests demand it of us,
+in relation to them, that the mind, and not the instincts, shall be at
+work.  Otherwise the course of a prudent policy is never to invoke them,
+but avoid.
+
+The upper class was gained by her intrepidity, her charm, and her
+elsewhere offending wit, however the case might go.  It is chivalrous,
+but not, alas, inflammable in support of innocence.  The class below it
+is governed in estimates of character by accepted patterns of conduct;
+yet where innocence under persecution is believed to exist, the members
+animated by that belief can be enthusiastic.  Enthusiasm is a heaven-sent
+steeplechaser, and takes a flying leap of the ordinary barriers; it is
+more intrusive than chivalry, and has a passion to communicate its
+ardour.  Two letters from stranger ladies reached Diana, through her
+lawyers and Lady Dunstane.  Anonymous letters, not so welcome, being male
+effusions, arrived at her lodgings, one of them comical almost over the
+verge to pathos in its termination: 'To me you will ever be the Goddess
+Diana--my faith in woman!'
+
+He was unacquainted with her!
+
+She had not the heart to think the writers donkeys.  How they obtained
+her address was a puzzle; they stole in to comfort her slightly.  They
+attached her to her position of Defendant by the thought of what would
+have been the idea of her character if she had flown--a reflection
+emanating from inexperience of the resources of sentimentalists.
+
+If she had flown!  She was borne along by the tide like a butterfly that
+a fish may gobble unless a friendly hand shall intervene.  And could it
+in nature?  She was past expectation of release.  The attempt to imagine
+living with any warmth of blood in her vindicated character, for the sake
+of zealous friends, consigned her to a cold and empty house upon a
+foreign earth.  She had to set her mind upon the mysterious enshrouded
+Twelve, with whom the verdict would soon be hanging, that she might
+prompt her human combativeness to desire the vindication at such a price
+as she would have to pay for it.  When Emma Dunstane spoke to her of the
+certainty of triumphing, she suggested a possible dissentient among the
+fateful Twelve, merely to escape the drumming sound of that hollow big
+word.  The irreverent imp of her humour came to her relief by calling
+forth the Twelve, in the tone of the clerk of the Court, and they
+answered to their names of trades and crafts after the manner of
+Titania's elves, and were questioned as to their fitness, by education,
+habits, enlightenment, to pronounce decisively upon the case in dispute,
+the case being plainly stated.  They replied, that the long habit of
+dealing with scales enabled them to weigh the value of evidence the most
+delicate.  Moreover, they were Englishmen, and anything short of
+downright bullet facts went to favour the woman.  For thus we light the
+balance of legal injustice toward the sex: we conveniently wink, ma'am.
+A rough, old-fashioned way for us!  Is it a Breach of Promise?--She may
+reckon on her damages: we have daughters of our own.  Is it a suit for
+Divorce?--Well, we have wives of our own, and we can lash, or we can
+spare; that's as it may be; but we'll keep the couple tied, let 'em hate
+as they like, if they can't furnish pork-butchers' reasons for sundering;
+because the man makes the money in this country.--My goodness! what a
+funny people, sir!--It 's our way of holding the balance, ma'am.--But
+would it not be better to rectify the law and the social system, dear
+sir?--Why, ma'am, we find it comfortabler to take cases as they come, in
+the style of our fathers.--But don't you see, my good man, that you are
+offering scapegoats for the comfort of the majority?--Well, ma'am, there
+always were scapegoats, and always will be; we find it comes round pretty
+square in the end.
+
+'And I may be the scapegoat, Emmy!  It is perfectly possible.  The
+grocer, the pork-butcher, drysalter, stationer, tea-merchant, et caetera
+--they sit on me.  I have studied the faces of the juries, and Mr.
+Braddock tells me of their composition.  And he admits that they do
+justice roughly--a rough and tumble country! to quote him--though he says
+they are honest in intention.'
+
+'More shame to the man who drags you before them--if he persists!' Emma
+rejoined.
+
+'He will.  I know him.  I would not have him draw back now,' said Diana,
+catching her breath.  'And, dearest, do not abuse him; for if you do, you
+set me imagining guiltiness.  Oh, heaven!--suppose me publicly pardoned!
+No, I have kinder feelings when we stand opposed.  It is odd, and rather
+frets my conscience, to think of the little resentment I feel.  Hardly
+any!  He has not cause to like his wife.  I can own it, and I am sorry
+for him, heartily.  No two have ever come together so naturally
+antagonistic as we two.  We walked a dozen steps in stupefied union, and
+hit upon crossways.  From that moment it was tug and tug; he me, I him.
+By resisting, I made him a tyrant; and he, by insisting, made me a rebel.
+And he was the maddest of tyrants--a weak one.  My dear, he was also a
+double-dealer.  Or no, perhaps not in design.  He was moved at one time
+by his interests; at another by his idea of his honour.  He took what I
+could get for him, and then turned and drubbed me for getting it.'
+
+'This is the creature you try to excuse!' exclaimed indignant Emma.
+
+'Yes, because--but fancy all the smart things I said being called my
+"sallies"!--can a woman live with it?--because I behaved .  .  .  I
+despised him too much, and I showed it.  He is not a contemptible man
+before the world; he is merely a very narrow one under close inspection.
+I could not--or did not--conceal my feeling.  I showed it not only to
+him, to my friend.  Husband grew to mean to me stifler, lung-contractor,
+iron mask, inquisitor, everything anti-natural.  He suffered under my
+"sallies": and it was the worse for him when he did not perceive their
+drift.  He is an upright man; I have not seen marked meanness.  One might
+build up a respectable figure in negatives.  I could add a row of noughts
+to the single number he cherishes, enough to make a millionnaire of him;
+but strike away the first, the rest are wind.  Which signifies, that if
+you do not take his estimate of himself, you will think little of his:
+negative virtues.  He is not eminently, that is to say, not saliently,
+selfish; not rancorous, not obtrusive--tata-ta-ta.  But dull!--dull as a
+woollen nightcap over eyes and ears and mouth.  Oh! an executioner's
+black cap to me.  Dull, and suddenly staring awake to the idea of his
+honour.  I "rendered" him ridiculous--I had caught a trick of "using
+men's phrases."  Dearest, now that the day of trial draws nigh--you have
+never questioned me, and it was like you to spare me pain--but now I can
+speak of him and myself.'  Diana dropped her voice.  Here was another
+confession.  The proximity of the trial acted like fire on her faded
+recollection of incidents.  It may be that partly the shame of alluding
+to them had blocked her woman's memory.  For one curious operation of the
+charge of guiltiness upon the nearly guiltless is to make them paint
+themselves pure white, to the obliteration of minor spots, until the
+whiteness being acknowledged, or the ordeal imminent, the spots recur and
+press upon their consciences.  She resumed, in a rapid undertone: 'You
+know that a certain degree of independence had been, if not granted by
+him, conquered by me.  I had the habit of it.  Obedience with him is
+imprisonment--he is a blind wall.  He received a commission, greatly to
+his advantage, and was absent.  He seems to have received information of
+some sort.  He returned unexpectedly, at a late hour, and attacked me at
+once, middling violent.  My friend--and that he is! was coming from the
+House for a ten minutes' talk, as usual, on his way home, to refresh him
+after the long sitting and bear-baiting he had nightly to endure.  Now
+let me confess: I grew frightened; Mr. Warwick was "off his head," as
+they say-crazy, and I could not bear the thought of those two meeting.
+While he raged I threw open the window and put the lamp near it, to
+expose the whole interior--cunning as a veteran intriguer: horrible, but
+it had to be done to keep them apart.  He asked me what madness possessed
+me, to sit by an open window at midnight, in view of the public, with a
+damp wind blowing.  I complained of want of air and fanned my forehead.
+I heard the steps on the pavement; I stung him to retort loudly, and I
+was relieved; the steps passed on.  So the trick succeeded--the trick!
+It was the worst I was guilty of, but it was a trick, and it branded me
+trickster.  It teaches me to see myself with an abyss in my nature full
+of infernal possibilities.  I think I am hewn in black rock.  A woman who
+can do as I did by instinct, needs to have an angel always near her, if
+she has not a husband she reveres.'
+
+'We are none of us better than you, dear Tony; only some are more
+fortunate, and many are cowards,' Emma said.  'You acted prudently in a
+wretched situation, partly of your own making, partly of the
+circumstances.  But a nature like yours could not sit still and moan.
+That marriage was to blame!  The English notion of women seems to be that
+we are born white sheep or black; circumstances have nothing to do with
+our colour.  They dread to grant distinctions, and to judge of us
+discerningly is beyond them.  Whether the fiction, that their homes are
+purer than elsewhere, helps to establish the fact, I do not know: there
+is a class that does live honestly; and at any rate it springs from a
+liking for purity; but I am sure that their method of impressing it on
+women has the dangers of things artificial.  They narrow their
+understanding of human nature, and that is not the way to improve the
+breed.'
+
+'I suppose we women are taken to be the second thoughts of the Creator;
+human nature's fringes, mere finishing touches, not a part of the
+texture,' said Diana; 'the pretty ornamentation.  However, I fancy
+I perceive some tolerance growing in the minds of the dominant sex.
+Our old lawyer Mr. Braddock, who appears to have no distaste for
+conversations with me, assures me he expects the day to come when
+women will be encouraged to work at crafts and professions for their
+independence.  That is the secret of the opinion of us at present--our
+dependency.  Give us the means of independence, and we will gain it, and
+have a turn at judging you, my lords!  You shall behold a world reversed.
+Whenever I am distracted by existing circumstances, I lay my finger on
+the material conditions, and I touch the secret.  Individually, it may be
+moral with us; collectively, it is material-gross wrongs, gross hungers.
+I am a married rebel, and thereof comes the social rebel.  I was once a
+dancing and singing girl: You remember the night of the Dublin Ball.
+A Channel sea in uproar, stirred by witches, flows between.'
+
+'You are as lovely as you were then--I could say, lovelier,' said Emma.
+
+'I have unconquerable health, and I wish I could give you the half of it,
+dear.  I work late into the night, and I wake early and fresh in the
+morning.  I do not sing, that is all.  A few days more, and my character
+will be up before the Bull's Head to face him in the arena.  The worst of
+a position like mine is, that it causes me incessantly to think and talk
+of myself.  I believe I think less than I talk, but the subject is
+growing stale; as those who are long dying feel, I dare say--if they
+do not take it as the compensation for their departure.'
+
+The Bull's Head, or British Jury of Twelve, with the wig on it, was faced
+during the latter half of a week of good news.  First, Mr. Thomas
+Redworth was returned to Parliament by a stout majority for the Borough
+of Orrybridge: the Hon. Percy Dacier delivered a brilliant speech in the
+House of Commons, necessarily pleasing to his uncle: Lord Larrian
+obtained the command of the Rock: the house of The Crossways was let
+to a tenant approved by Mr. Braddock: Diana received the opening proof-
+sheets of her little volume, and an instalment of the modest honorarium:
+and finally, the Plaintiff in the suit involving her name was adjudged to
+have not proved his charge.
+
+She heard of it without a change of countenance.
+
+She could not have wished it the reverse; she was exonerated.  But she
+was not free; far from that; and she revenged herself on the friends who
+made much of her triumph and overlooked her plight, by showing no sign of
+satisfaction.  There was in her bosom a revolt at the legal consequences
+of the verdict--or blunt acquiescence of the Law in the conditions
+possibly to be imposed on her unless she went straight to the relieving
+phial; and the burden of keeping it under, set her wildest humour alight,
+somewhat as Redworth remembered of her on the journey from The Crossways
+to Copsley.  This ironic fury, coming of the contrast of the outer and
+the inner, would have been indulged to the extent of permanent injury to
+her disposition had not her beloved Emma, immediately after the tension
+of the struggle ceased, required her tenderest aid.  Lady Dunstane
+chanted victory, and at night collapsed.  By the advice of her physician
+she was removed to Copsley, where Diana's labour of anxious nursing
+restored her through love to a saner spirit.  The hopefulness of life
+must bloom again in the heart whose prayers are offered for a life dearer
+than its own to be preserved.  A little return of confidence in Sir Lukin
+also refreshed her when she saw that the poor creature did honestly, in
+his shaggy rough male fashion, reverence and cling to the flower of souls
+he named as his wife.  His piteous groans of self-accusation during the
+crisis haunted her, and made the conduct and nature of men a bewilderment
+to her still young understanding.  Save for the knot of her sensations
+(hardly a mental memory, but a sullen knot) which she did not disentangle
+to charge him with his complicity in the blind rashness of her marriage,
+she might have felt sisterly, as warmly as she compassionated him.
+
+It was midwinter when Dame Gossip, who keeps the exotic world alive with
+her fanning whispers, related that the lovely Mrs. Warwick had left
+England on board the schooner-yacht Clarissa, with Lord and Lady Esquart,
+for a voyage in the Mediterranean: and (behind her hand) that the reason
+was urgent, inasmuch as she fled to escape the meshes of the terrific net
+of the marital law brutally whirled to capture her by the man her
+husband.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+INTRODUCES THE HON. PERCY DACIER
+
+The Gods of this world's contests, against whom our poor stripped
+individual is commonly in revolt, are, as we know, not miners, they
+are reapers; and if we appear no longer on the surface, they cease to
+bruise us: they will allow an arena character to be cleansed and made
+presentable while enthusiastic friends preserve discretion.  It is
+of course less than magnanimity; they are not proposed to you for your
+worship; they are little Gods, temporary as that great wave, their parent
+human mass of the hour.  But they have one worshipful element in them,
+which is, the divine insistency upon there being two sides to a case
+--to every case.  And the People so far directed by them may boast of
+healthfulness.  Let the individual shriek, the innocent, triumphant,
+have in honesty to admit the fact.  One side is vanquished, according
+to decree of Law, but the superior Council does not allow it to be
+extinguished.
+
+Diana's battle was fought shadowily behind her for the space of a week
+or so, with some advocates on behalf of the beaten man; then it became
+a recollection of a beautiful woman, possibly erring, misvalued by a
+husband, who was neither a man of the world nor a gracious yokefellow,
+nor anything to match her.  She, however, once out of the public flames,
+had to recall her scorchings to be gentle with herself.  Under a defeat,
+she would have been angrily self-vindicated.  The victory of the ashen
+laurels drove her mind inward to gird at the hateful yoke, in compassion
+for its pair of victims.  Quite earnestly by such means, yet always
+bearing a comical eye on her subterfuges, she escaped the extremes of
+personal blame.  Those advocates of her opponent in and out of court
+compelled her honest heart to search within and own to faults.  But were
+they not natural faults?  It was her marriage; it was marriage in the
+abstract: her own mistake and the world's clumsy machinery of
+civilization: these were the capital offenders: not the wife who would
+laugh ringingly, and would have friends of the other sex, and shot her
+epigrams at the helpless despot, and was at times--yes, vixenish;
+a nature driven to it, but that was the word.  She was too generous to
+recount her charges against the vanquished.  If his wretched jealousy had
+ruined her, the secret high tribunal within her bosom, which judged her
+guiltless for putting the sword between their marriage tie when they
+stood as one, because a quarrelling couple could not in honour play the
+embracing, pronounced him just pardonable.  She distinguished that he
+could only suppose, manlikely, one bad cause for the division.
+
+To this extent she used her unerring brains, more openly than on her
+night of debate at The Crossways.  The next moment she was off in vapour,
+meditating grandly on her independence of her sex and the passions.
+Love! she did not know it, she was not acquainted with either the
+criminal or the domestic God, and persuaded herself that she never could
+be.  She was a Diana of coldness, preferring friendship; she could be the
+friend of men.  There was another who could be the friend of women.  Her
+heart leapt to Redworth.  Conjuring up his clear trusty face, at their
+grasp of hands when parting, she thought of her visions of her future
+about the period of the Dublin Ball, and acknowledged, despite the
+erratic step to wedlock, a gain in having met and proved so true a
+friend.  His face, figure, character, lightest look, lightest word, all
+were loyal signs of a man of honour, cold as she; he was the man to whom
+she could have opened her heart for inspection.  Rejoicing in her
+independence of an emotional sex, the impulsive woman burned with a
+regret that at their parting she had not broken down conventional
+barriers and given her cheek to his lips in the antiinsular fashion with
+a brotherly friend.  And why not when both were cold?  Spirit to spirit,
+she did, delightfully refreshed by her capacity to do so without a throb.
+He had held her hands and looked into her eyes half a minute, like a dear
+comrade; as little arousing her instincts of defensiveness as the
+clearing heavens; and sisterly love for it was his due, a sister's kiss.
+He needed a sister, and should have one in her.  Emma's recollected talk
+of 'Tom Redworth' painted him from head to foot, brought the living man
+over the waters to the deck of the yacht.  A stout champion in the person
+of Tom Redworth was left on British land; but for some reason past
+analysis, intermixed, that is, among a swarm of sensations, Diana named
+her champion to herself with the formal prefix: perhaps because she knew
+a man's Christian name to be dangerous handling.  They differed besides
+frequently in opinion, when the habit of thinking of him as Mr. Redworth
+would be best.  Women are bound to such small observances, and especially
+the beautiful of the sisterhood, whom the world soon warns that they
+carry explosives and must particularly guard against the ignition of
+petty sparks.  She was less indiscreet in her thoughts than in her acts,
+as is the way with the reflective daughter of impulse; though she had
+fine mental distinctions: what she could offer to do 'spirit to spirit,'
+for instance, held nothing to her mind of the intimacy of calling the
+gentleman plain Tom in mere contemplation of him.  Her friend and
+champion was a volunteer, far from a mercenary, and he deserved the
+reward, if she could bestow it unalarmed.  They were to meet in Egypt.
+Meanwhile England loomed the home of hostile forces ready to shock, had
+she been a visible planet, and ready to secrete a virus of her past
+history, had she been making new.
+
+She was happily away, borne by a whiter than swan's wing on the sapphire
+Mediterranean.  Her letters to Emma were peeps of splendour for the
+invalid: her way of life on board the yacht, and sketches of her host and
+hostess as lovers in wedlock on the other side of our perilous forties;
+sketches of the bays, the towns, the people-priests, dames, cavaliers,
+urchins, infants, shifting groups of supple southerners-flashed across
+the page like a web of silk, and were dashed off, redolent of herself,
+as lightly as the silvery spray of the blue waves she furrowed; telling,
+without allusions to the land behind her, that she had dipped in the
+wells of blissful oblivion.  Emma Dunstane, as is usual with those who
+receive exhilarating correspondence from makers of books, condemned the
+authoress in comparison, and now first saw that she had the gift of
+writing.  Only one cry: 'Italy, Eden of exiles!' betrayed the seeming of
+a moan.  She wrote of her poet and others immediately.  Thither had they
+fled; with adieu to England!
+
+How many have waved the adieu!  And it is England nourishing, England
+protecting them, England clothing them in the honours they wear.  Only
+the posturing lower natures, on the level of their buskins, can pluck out
+the pocket-knife of sentimental spite to cut themselves loose from her at
+heart in earnest.  The higher, bleed as they may, too pressingly feel
+their debt.  Diana had the Celtic vivid sense of country.  In England she
+was Irish, by hereditary, and by wilful opposition.  Abroad, gazing along
+the waters, observing, comparing, reflecting, above all, reading of the
+struggles at home, the things done and attempted, her soul of generosity
+made her, though not less Irish, a daughter of Britain.  It is at a
+distance that striving countries should be seen if we would have them in
+the pure idea; and this young woman of fervid mind, a reader of public
+speeches and speculator on the tides of politics (desirous, further, to
+feel herself rather more in the pure idea), began to yearn for England
+long before her term of holiday exile had ended.  She had been flattered
+by her friend, her 'wedded martyr at the stake,' as she named him, to
+believe that she could exercise a judgement in politics--could think,
+even speak acutely, on public affairs.  The reports of speeches delivered
+by the men she knew or knew of, set her thrilling; and she fancied the
+sensibility to be as independent of her sympathy with the orators as her
+political notions were sovereignty above a sex devoted to trifles,
+and the feelings of a woman who had gone through fire.  She fancied it
+confidently, notwithstanding a peculiar intuition that the plunge into
+the nobler business of the world would be a haven of safety for a woman
+with blood and imagination, when writing to Emma: 'Mr. Redworth's great
+success in Parliament is good in itself, whatever his views of present
+questions; and I do not heed them when I look to what may be done by a
+man of such power in striking at unjust laws, which keep the really
+numerically better-half of the population in a state of slavery.  If he
+had been a lawyer!  It must be a lawyer's initiative--a lawyer's Bill.
+Mr. Percy Dacier also spoke well, as might have been expected, and his
+uncle's compliment to him was merited.  Should you meet him sound him.
+He has read for the Bar, and is younger than Mr. Redworth.  The very
+young men and the old are our hope.  The middleaged are hard and fast for
+existing facts.  We pick our leaders on the slopes, the incline and
+decline of the mountain--not on the upper table-land midway, where all
+appears to men so solid, so tolerably smooth, save for a few
+excrescences, roughnesses, gradually to be levelled at their leisure;
+which induces one to protest that the middle-age of men is their time of
+delusion.  It is no paradox.  They may be publicly useful in a small way.
+I do not deny it at all.  They must be near the gates of life--the
+opening or the closing--for their minds to be accessible to the urgency
+of the greater questions.  Otherwise the world presents itself to them
+under too settled an aspect--unless, of course, Vesuvian Revolution
+shakes the land.  And that touches only their nerves.  I dream of some
+old Judge!  There is one--if having caught we could keep him.  But I
+dread so tricksy a pilot.  You have guessed him--the ancient Puck!
+We have laughed all day over the paper telling us of his worrying the
+Lords.  Lady Esquart congratulates her husband on being out of it.  Puck
+'biens ride' and bewigged might perhaps--except that at the critical
+moment he would be sure to plead allegiance to Oberon.  However, the work
+will be performed by some one: I am prophetic:--when maidens are
+grandmothers!--when your Tony is wearing a perpetual laugh in the
+unhusbanded regions where there is no institution of the wedding-tie.'
+
+For the reason that she was not to participate in the result of the old
+Judge's or young hero's happy championship of the cause of her sex, she
+conceived her separateness high aloof, and actually supposed she was a
+contemplative, simply speculative political spirit, impersonal albeit a
+woman.  This, as Emma, smiling at the lines, had not to learn, was always
+her secret pride of fancy--the belief in her possession of a disengaged
+intellect.
+
+The strange illusion, so clearly exposed to her correspondent, was
+maintained through a series of letters very slightly descriptive, dated
+from the Piraeus, the Bosphorus, the coasts of the Crimea, all more or
+less relating to the latest news of the journals received on board the
+yacht, and of English visitors fresh from the country she now seemed fond
+of calling 'home.'  Politics, and gentle allusions to the curious
+exhibition of 'love in marriage' shown by her amiable host and hostess:
+'these dear Esquarts, who are never tired of one another, but courtly
+courting, tempting me to think it possible that a fortunate selection
+and a mutual deference may subscribe to human happiness:--filled the
+paragraphs.  Reviews of her first literary venture were mentioned once:
+'I was well advised by Mr. Redworth in putting ANTONIA for authoress.
+She is a buff jerkin to the stripes, and I suspect that the signature of
+D. E. M., written in full, would have cawed woefully to hear that her
+style is affected, her characters nullities, her cleverness forced, etc.,
+etc.  As it is, I have much the same contempt for poor Antonia's
+performance. Cease penning, little fool!  She writes, "with some
+comprehension of the passion of love."  I know her to be a stranger to
+the earliest cry.  So you see, dear, that utter ignorance is the mother
+of the Art.  Dialogues "occasionally pointed."  She has a sister who may
+do better.--But why was I not apprenticed to a serviceable profession or
+a trade?  I perceive now that a hanger-on of the market had no right to
+expect a happier fate than mine has been.'
+
+On the Nile, in the winter of the year, Diana met the Hon. Percy Dacier.
+He was introduced to her at Cairo by Redworth.  The two gentlemen had
+struck up a House of Commons acquaintanceship, and finding themselves
+bound for the same destination, had grown friendly.  Redworth's arrival
+had been pleasantly expected.  She remarked on Dacier's presence to Emma,
+without sketch or note of him as other than much esteemed by Lord and
+Lady Esquart.  These, with Diana, Redworth, Dacier, the German Eastern
+traveller Schweizerbarth, and the French Consul and Egyptologist
+Duriette, composed a voyaging party up the river, of which expedition
+Redworth was Lady Dunstane's chief writer of the records.  His novel
+perceptiveness and shrewdness of touch made them amusing; and his
+tenderness to the Beauty's coquettry between the two foreign rivals,
+moved a deeper feeling.  The German had a guitar, the Frenchman a voice;
+Diana joined them in harmony.  They complained apart severally of the
+accompaniment and the singer.  Our English criticized them apart; and
+that is at any rate to occupy a post, though it contributes nothing to
+entertainment.  At home the Esquarts had sung duets; Diana had assisted
+Redworth's manly chest-notes at the piano.  Each of them declined to be
+vocal.  Diana sang alone for the credit of the country, Italian and
+French songs, Irish also.  She was in her mood of Planxty Kelly and
+Garryowen all the way.  'Madame est Irlandaise?' Redworth heard the
+Frenchman say, and he owned to what was implied in the answering tone
+of the question.  'We should be dull dogs without the Irish leaven!'
+So Tony in exile still managed to do something for her darling Erin.
+The solitary woman on her heights at Copsley raised an exclamation of,
+'Oh!  that those two had been or could be united!' She was conscious
+of a mystic symbolism in the prayer.
+
+She was not apprehensive of any ominous intervention of another.  Writing
+from Venice, Diana mentioned Mr. Percy Dacier as being engaged to an
+heiress; 'A Miss Asper, niece of a mighty shipowner, Mr. Quintin Manx,
+Lady Esquart tells me: money fabulous, and necessary to a younger son
+devoured with ambition.  The elder brother, Lord Creedmore, is a common
+Nimrod, always absent in Hungary, Russia, America, hunting somewhere.
+Mr. Dacier will be in the Cabinet with the next Ministry.'  No more of
+him.  A new work by ANTONIA was progressing.
+
+The Summer in South Tyrol passed like a royal procession before young
+eyes for Diana, and at the close of it, descending the Stelvio, idling
+through the Valtelline, Como Lake was reached, Diana full of her work,
+living the double life of the author.  At Bellagio one afternoon Mr.
+Percy Dacier appeared.  She remembered subsequently a disappointment
+she felt in not beholding Mr. Redworth either with him or displacing him.
+If engaged to a lady, he was not an ardent suitor; nor was he a pointedly
+complimentary acquaintance.  His enthusiasm was reserved for Italian
+scenery.  She had already formed a sort of estimate of his character, as
+an indifferent observer may do, and any woman previous to the inflaming
+of her imagination, if that is in store for her; and she now fell to work
+resetting the puzzle it became as soon her positive conclusions had to be
+shaped again.  'But women never can know young men,' she wrote to Emma,
+after praising his good repute as one of the brotherhood.  'He drops
+pretty sentences now and then: no compliments; milky nuts.  Of course he
+has a head, or he would not be where he is--and that seems always to me
+the most enviable place a young man can occupy.'  She observed in him a
+singular conflicting of a buoyant animal nature with a curb of
+studiousness, as if the fardels of age were piling on his shoulders
+before youth had quitted its pastures.
+
+His build of limbs and his features were those of the finely-bred
+English; he had the English taste for sports, games, manly diversions;
+and in the bloom of life, under thirty, his head was given to bend.  The
+head bending on a tall upright figure, where there was breadth of chest,
+told of weights working.  She recollected his open look, larger than
+inquiring, at the introduction to her; and it recurred when she uttered
+anything specially taking.  What it meant was past a guess, though
+comparing it with the frank directness of Redworth's eyes, she saw the
+difference between a look that accepted her and one that dilated on two
+opinions.
+
+Her thought of the gentleman was of a brilliant young charioteer in the
+ruck of the race, watchful for his chance to push to the front; and she
+could have said that a dubious consort might spoil a promising career.
+It flattered her to think that she sometimes prompted him, sometimes
+illumined.  He repeated sentences she had spoken.  'I shall be better
+able to describe Mr. Dacier when you and I sit together, my Emmy, and a
+stroke here and there completes the painting.  Set descriptions are good
+for puppets.  Living men and women are too various in the mixture
+fashioning them--even the "external presentment"--to be livingly rendered
+in a formal sketch.  I may tell you his eyes are pale blue, his features
+regular, his hair silky, brownish, his legs long, his head rather
+stooping (only the head), his mouth commonly closed; these are the facts,
+and you have seen much the same in a nursery doll.  Such literary craft
+is of the nursery.  So with landscapes.  The art of the pen (we write on
+darkness) is to rouse the inward vision, instead of labouring with a
+Drop-scene brush, as if it were to the eye; because our flying minds
+cannot contain a protracted description.  That is why the poets, who
+spring imagination with a word or a phrase, paint lasting pictures.  The
+Shakespearian, the Dantesque, are in a line, two at most.  He lends an
+attentive ear when I speak, agrees or has a quaint pucker of the eyebrows
+dissenting inwardly.  He lacks mental liveliness--cheerfulness, I should
+say, and is thankful to have it imparted.  One suspects he would be a
+dull domestic companion.  He has a veritable thirst for hopeful views of
+the world, and no spiritual distillery of his own.  He leans to
+depression.  Why!  The broken reed you call your Tony carries a cargo,
+all of her manufacture--she reeks of secret stills; and here is a young
+man--a sapling oak--inclined to droop.  His nature has an air of
+imploring me que je d'arrose!  I begin to perform Mrs. Dr. Pangloss on
+purpose to brighten him--the mind, the views.  He is not altogether
+deficient in conversational gaiety, and he shines in exercise.  But the
+world is a poor old ball bounding down a hill--to an Irish melody in the
+evening generally, by request.  So far of Mr. Percy Dacier, of whom I
+have some hopes--distant, perhaps delusive--that he may be of use to
+our cause.  He listens.  It is an auspicious commencement.'
+
+Lugano is the Italian lake most lovingly encircled by mountain arms, and
+every height about it may be scaled with esce.  The heights have their
+nest of waters below for a home scene, the southern Swiss peaks, with
+celestial Monta Rosa, in prospect.  It was there that Diana reawakened,
+after the trance of a deadly draught, to the glory of the earth and her
+share in it.  She wakened like the Princess of the Kiss; happily not to
+kisses; to no sign, touch or call that she could trace backward.  The
+change befell her without a warning.  After writing deliberately to her
+friend Emma, she laid down her pen and thought of nothing; and into this
+dreamfulness a wine passed, filling her veins, suffusing her mind,
+quickening her soul: and coming whence?  out of air, out of the yonder of
+air.  She could have imagined a seraphic presence in the room, that bade
+her arise and live; take the cup of the wells of youth arrested at her
+lips by her marriage; quit her wintry bondage for warmth, light, space,
+the quick of simple being.  And the strange pure ecstasy was not a
+transient electrification; it came in waves on a continuous tide; looking
+was living; walking flying.  She hardly knew that she slept.  The heights
+she had seen rosy at eve were marked for her ascent in the dawn.  Sleep
+was one wink, and fresh as the dewy field and rockflowers on her way
+upward, she sprang to more and more of heaven, insatiable, happily
+chirruping over her possessions.  The threading of the town among the
+dear common people before others were abroad, was a pleasure and pleasant
+her solitariness threading the gardens at the base of the rock, only she
+astir; and the first rough steps of the winding footpath, the first
+closed buds, the sharper air, the uprising of the mountain with her
+ascent; and pleasant too was her hunger and the nibble at a little loaf
+of bread.  A linnet sang in her breast, an eagle lifted her feet.  The
+feet were verily winged, as they are in a season of youth when the blood
+leaps to light from the pressure of the under forces, like a source at
+the wellheads, and the whole creature blooms, vital in every energy as a
+spirit.  To be a girl again was magical.  She could fancy her having
+risen from the dead.  And to be a girl, with a woman's broader vision and
+receptiveness of soul, with knowledge of evil, and winging to ethereal
+happiness, this was a revelation of our human powers.
+
+She attributed the change to the influences of nature's beauty and
+grandeur.  Nor had her woman's consciousness to play the chrysalis in any
+shy recesses of her heart; she was nowhere veiled or torpid; she was
+illumined, like the Salvatore she saw in the evening beams and mounted in
+the morning's; and she had not a spot of seeresy; all her nature flew and
+bloomed; she was bird, flower, flowing river, a quivering sensibility
+unweighted, enshrouded.  Desires and hopes would surely have weighted and
+shrouded her.  She had none, save for the upper air, the eyes of the
+mountain.
+
+Which was the dream--her past life or this ethereal existence?  But this
+ran spontaneously, and the other had often been stimulated--her
+vivaciousness on the Nile-boat, for a recent example.  She had not a
+doubt that her past life was the dream, or deception: and for the reason
+that now she was compassionate, large of heart toward all beneath her.
+Let them but leave her free, they were forgiven, even to prayers for
+their well-being!  The plural number in the case was an involuntary
+multiplying of the single, coming of her incapacity during this elevation
+and rapture of the senses to think distinctly of that One who had
+discoloured her opening life.  Freedom to breathe, gaze, climb, grow with
+the grasses, fly with the clouds, to muse, to sing, to be an unclaimed
+self, dispersed upon earth, air, sky, to find a keener transfigured self
+in that radiation--she craved no more.
+
+Bear in mind her beauty, her charm of tongue, her present state of white
+simplicity in fervour: was there ever so perilous a woman for the most
+guarded and clearest-eyed of young men to meet at early morn upon a
+mountain side?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+TREATS OF A MIDNIGHT BELL, AND OF A SCENE OF EARLY MORNING
+
+On a round of the mountains rising from Osteno, South eastward of Lugano,
+the Esquart party rose from the natural grotto and headed their carriages
+up and down the defiles, halting for a night at Rovio, a little village
+below the Generoso, lively with waterfalls and watercourses; and they
+fell so in love with the place, that after roaming along the flowery
+borderways by moonlight, they resolved to rest there two or three days
+and try some easy ascents.  In the diurnal course of nature, being
+pleasantly tired, they had the avowed intention of sleeping there; so
+they went early to their beds, and carelessly wished one another good-
+night, none of them supposing slumber to be anywhere one of the warlike
+arts, a paradoxical thing you must battle for and can only win at last
+when utterly beaten.  Hard by their inn, close enough for a priestly
+homily to have been audible, stood a church campanile, wherein hung a
+Bell, not ostensibly communicating with the demons of the pit; in
+daylight rather a merry comrade.  But at night, when the children of
+nerves lay stretched, he threw off the mask.  As soon as they had fairly
+nestled, he smote their pillows a shattering blow, loud for the retold
+preluding quarters, incredibly clanging the number ten.  Then he waited
+for neighbouring campanili to box the ears of slumber's votaries in turn;
+whereupon, under pretence of excessive conscientiousness, or else
+oblivious of his antecedent, damnable misconduct, or perhaps in actual
+league and trapdoor conspiracy with the surging goblin hosts beneath us,
+he resumed his blaring strokes, a sonorous recapitulation of the number;
+all the others likewise.  It was an alarum fit to warn of Attila or
+Alaric; and not, simply the maniacal noise invaded the fruitful provinces
+of sleep like Hun and Vandal, the irrational repetition ploughed the
+minds of those unhappy somnivolents, leaving them worse than sheared by
+barbarians, disrupt, as by earthquake, with the unanswerable question to
+Providence, Why!--Why twice?
+
+Designing slumberers are such infants.  When they have undressed and
+stretched themselves, flat, it seems that they have really gone back to
+their mothers' breasts, and they fret at whatsoever does not smack of
+nature, or custom.  The cause of a repetition so senseless in its
+violence, and so unnecessary, set them querying and kicking until the
+inevitable quarters recommenced.  Then arose an insurgent rabble in their
+bosoms, it might be the loosened imps of darkness, urging them to
+speculate whether the proximate monster about to dole out the eleventh
+hour in uproar would again forget himself and repeat his dreary
+arithmetic a second time; for they were unaware of his religious
+obligation, following the hour of the district, to inform them of the
+tardy hour of Rome.  They waited in suspense, curiosity enabling them to
+bear the first crash callously.  His performance was the same.  And now
+they took him for a crazy engine whose madness had infected the whole
+neighbourhood.  Now was the moment to fight for sleep in contempt of him,
+and they began by simulating an entry into the fortress they were to
+defend, plunging on their pillows, battening down their eyelids,
+breathing with a dreadful regularity.  Alas!  it came to their knowledge
+that the Bell was in possession and they the besiegers.  Every resonant
+quarter was anticipated up to the blow, without averting its murderous
+abruptness; and an executioner Midnight that sounded, in addition to the
+reiterated quarters, four and twenty ringing hammerstrokes, with the
+aching pause between the twelves, left them the prey of the legions of
+torturers which are summed, though not described, in the title of a
+sleepless night.
+
+From that period the curse was milder, but the victims raged.  They swam
+on vasty deeps, they knocked at rusty gates, they shouldered all the
+weapons of black Insomnia's armoury and became her soldiery, doing her
+will upon themselves.  Of her originally sprang the inspired teaching of
+the doom of men to excruciation in endlessness.  She is the fountain of
+the infinite ocean whereon the exceedingly sensitive soul is tumbled
+everlastingly, with the diversion of hot pincers to appease its appetite
+for change.
+
+Dacier was never the best of sleepers.  He had taken to exercise his
+brains prematurely, not only in learning, but also in reflection; and a
+reflectiveness that is indulged before we have a rigid mastery of the
+emotions, or have slain them, is apt to make a young man more than
+commonly a child of nerves: nearly as much so as the dissipated, with the
+difference that they are hilarious while wasting their treasury, which he
+is not; and he may recover under favouring conditions, which is a point
+of vantage denied to them.  Physically he had stout reserves, for he had
+not disgraced the temple.  His intemperateness lay in the craving to rise
+and lead: a precocious ambition.  This apparently modest young man
+started with an aim--and if in the distance and with but a slingstone,
+like the slender shepherd fronting the Philistine, all his energies were
+in his aim--at Government.  He had hung on the fringe of an
+Administration.  His party was out, and he hoped for higher station on
+its return to power.  Many perplexities were therefore buzzing about his
+head; among them at present one sufficiently magnified and voracious to
+swallow the remainder.  He added force to the interrogation as to why
+that Bell should sound its inhuman strokes twice, by asking himself why
+he was there to hear it!  A strange suspicion of a bewitchment might have
+enlightened him if he had been a man accustomed to yield to the peculiar
+kind of sorcery issuing from that sex.  He rather despised the power of
+women over men: and nevertheless he was there, listening to that Bell,
+instead of having obeyed the call of his family duties, when the latter
+were urgent.  He had received letters at Lugano, summoning him home,
+before he set forth on his present expedition.  The noisy alarum told him
+he floundered in quags, like a silly creature chasing a marsh-lamp.  But
+was it so?  Was it not, on the contrary, a serious pursuit of the secret
+of a woman's character?--Oh, a woman and her character!  Ordinary women
+and their characters might set to work to get what relationship and
+likeness they could.  They had no secret to allure.  This one had: she
+had the secret of lake waters under rock, unfathomable in limpidness.
+He could not think of her without shooting at nature, and nature's very
+sweetest and subtlest, for comparison.  As to her sex, his active man's
+contempt of the petticoated secret attractive to boys and graylings, made
+him believe that in her he hunted the mind and the spirit: perchance a
+double mind, a twilighted spirit; but not a mere woman.  She bore no
+resemblance to the bundle of women.  Well, she was worth studying; she
+had ideas, and could give ear to ideas.  Furthermore, a couple of the
+members of his family inclined to do her injustice.  At least, they
+judged her harshly, owing, he thought, to an inveterate opinion they held
+regarding Lord Dannisburgh's obliquity in relation to women.  He shared
+it, and did not concur in, their verdict upon the woman implicated.  That
+is to say, knowing something of her now, he could see the possibility of
+her innocence in the special charm that her mere sparkle of features and
+speech, and her freshness would have for a man like his uncle.  The
+possibility pleaded strongly on her behalf, while the darker possibility
+weighted by his uncle's reputation plucked at him from below.
+
+She was delightful to hear, delightful to see; and her friends loved her
+and had faith in her.  So clever a woman might be too clever for her
+friends!  .  .  .
+
+The circle he moved in hummed of women, prompting novices as well as
+veterans to suspect that the multitude of them, and notably the fairest,
+yet more the cleverest, concealed the serpent somewhere.
+
+She certainly had not directed any of her arts upon him.  Besides he was
+half engaged.  And that was a burning perplexity; not because of abstract
+scruples touching the necessity for love in marriage.  The young lady,
+great heiress though she was, and willing, as she allowed him to assume;
+graceful too, reputed a beauty; struck him cold.  He fancied her
+transparent, only Arctic.  Her transparency displayed to him all the
+common virtues, and a serene possession of the inestimable and eminent
+one outweighing all; but charm, wit, ardour, intercommunicative
+quickness, and kindling beauty, airy grace, were qualities that a man,
+it seemed, had to look for in women spotted by a doubt of their having
+the chief and priceless.
+
+However, he was not absolutely plighted.  Nor did it matter to him
+whether this or that woman concealed the tail of the serpent and trail,
+excepting the singular interest this woman managed to excite, and so
+deeply as set him wondering how that Resurrection Bell might be affecting
+her ability to sleep.  Was she sleeping?--or waking?  His nervous
+imagination was a torch that alternately lighted her lying asleep with
+the innocent, like a babe, and tossing beneath the overflow of her dark
+hair, hounded by haggard memories.  She fluttered before him in either
+aspect; and another perplexity now was to distinguish within himself
+which was the aspect he preferred.  Great Nature brought him thus to
+drink of her beauty, under the delusion that the act was a speculation
+on her character.
+
+The Bell, with its clash, throb and long swoon of sound, reminded him of
+her name: Diana!--An attribute?  or a derision?
+
+It really mattered nothing to him, save for her being maligned; and if
+most unfairly, then that face of the varying expressions, and the rich
+voice, and the remembered gentle and taking words coming from her,
+appealed to him with a supplicating vividness that pricked his heart to
+leap.
+
+He was dozing when the Bell burst through the thin division between
+slumber and wakefulness, recounting what seemed innumerable peals, hard
+on his cranium.  Gray daylight blanched the window and the bed: his watch
+said five of the morning.  He thought of the pleasure of a bath beneath
+some dashing spray-showers; and jumped up to dress, feeling a queer
+sensation of skin in his clothes, the sign of a feverish night; and
+yawning he went into the air.  Leftward the narrow village street led to
+the footway along which he could make for the mountain-wall.  He cast one
+look at the head of the campanile, silly as an owlish roysterer's glazed
+stare at the young Aurora, and hurried his feet to check the yawns coming
+alarmingly fast, in the place of ideas.
+
+His elevation above the valley was about the kneecap of the Generoso.
+Waters of past rain-clouds poured down the mountain-sides like veins of
+metal, here and there flinging off a shower on the busy descent; only
+dubiously animate in the lack lustre of the huge bulk piled against a
+yellow East that wafted fleets of pinky cloudlets overhead.  He mounted
+his path to a level with inviting grassmounds where water circled,
+running from scoops and cups to curves and brook-streams, and in his
+fancy calling to him to hear them.  To dip in them was his desire.  To
+roll and shiver braced by the icy flow was the spell to break that
+baleful incantation of the intolerable night; so he struck across a ridge
+of boulders, wreck of a landslip from the height he had hugged, to the
+open space of shadowed undulations, and soon had his feet on turf.
+Heights to right and to left, and between them, aloft, a sky the rosy
+wheelcourse of the chariot of morn, and below, among the knolls, choice
+of sheltered nooks where waters whispered of secresy to satisfy Diana
+herself.  They have that whisper and waving of secresy in secret scenery;
+they beckon to the bath; and they conjure classic visions of the pudency
+of the Goddess irate or unsighted.  The semi-mythological state of mind,
+built of old images and favouring haunts, was known to Dacier.  The name
+of Diana, playing vaguely on his consciousness, helped to it.  He had no
+definite thought of the mortal woman when the highest grass-roll near the
+rock gave him view of a bowered source and of a pool under a chain of
+cascades, bounded by polished shelves and slabs.  The very spot for him,
+he decided at the first peep; and at the second, with fingers
+instinctively loosening his waist-coat buttons for a commencement, he
+shouldered round and strolled away, though not at a rapid pace, nor far
+before he halted.
+
+That it could be no other than she, the figure he had seen standing
+beside the pool, he was sure.  Why had he turned?  Thoughts thick and
+swift as a blush in the cheeks of seventeen overcame him; and queen of
+all, the thought bringing the picture of this mountain-solitude to
+vindicate a woman shamefully assailed.--She who found her pleasure in
+these haunts of nymph and Goddess, at the fresh cold bosom of nature,
+must be clear as day.  She trusted herself to the loneliness here, and to
+the honour of men, from a like irreflective sincereness.  She was unable
+to imagine danger where her own impelling thirst was pure.  .  .
+
+The thoughts, it will be discerned, were but flashes of a momentary
+vivid sensibility.  Where a woman's charm has won half the battle, her
+character is an advancing standard and sings victory, let her do no more
+than take a quiet morning walk before breakfast.
+
+But why had he turned his back on her?  There was nothing in his presence
+to alarm, nothing in her appearance to forbid.  The motive and the
+movement were equally quaint; incomprehensible to him; for after putting
+himself out of sight, he understood the absurdity of the supposition that
+she would seek the secluded sylvan bath for the same purpose as he.  Yet
+now he was, debarred from going to meet her.  She might have an impulse
+to bathe her feet.  Her name was Diana .  .  .  .
+
+Yes, and a married woman; and a proclaimed one!
+
+And notwithstanding those brassy facts, he was ready to side with the
+evidence declaring her free from stain; and further, to swear that her
+blood was Diana's!
+
+Nor had Dacier ever been particularly poetical about women.  The present
+Diana had wakened his curiosity, had stirred his interest in her, pricked
+his admiration, but gradually, until a sleepless night with its flock of
+raven-fancies under that dominant Bell, ended by colouring her, the
+moment she stood in his eyes, as freshly as the morning heavens.  We
+are much influenced in youth by sleepless nights: they disarm, they
+predispose us to submit to soft occasion; and in our youth occasion
+is always coming.
+
+He heard her voice.  She had risen up the grass-mound, and he hung
+brooding half-way down.  She was dressed in some texture of the hue of
+lavender.  A violet scarf loosely knotted over the bosom opened on her
+throat.  The loop of her black hair curved under a hat of gray beaver.
+Memorably radiant was her face.
+
+They met, exchanged greetings, praised the beauty of the morning, and
+struck together on the Bell.  She laughed: 'I heard it at ten; I slept
+till four.  I never wake later.  I was out in the air by half-past.  Were
+you disturbed?'
+
+He alluded to his troubles with the Bell.
+
+'It sounded like a felon's heart in skeleton ribs,' he said.
+
+'Or a proser's tongue in a hollow skull,' said she.
+
+He bowed to her conversible readiness, and at once fell into the
+background, as he did only with her, to perform accordant bass in their
+dialogue; for when a woman lightly caps our strained remarks, we
+gallantly surrender the leadership, lest she should too cuttingly
+assert her claim.
+
+Some sweet wild cyclamen flowers were at her breast.  She held in her
+left hand a bunch of buds and blown cups of the pale purple meadow-
+crocus.  He admired them.  She told him to look round.  He confessed to
+not having noticed them in the grass: what was the name?  Colchicum, in
+Botany, she said.
+
+'These are plucked to be sent to a friend; otherwise I'm reluctant to
+take the life of flowers for a whim.  Wild flowers, I mean.  I am not
+sentimental about garden flowers: they are cultivated for decoration,
+grown for clipping.'
+
+'I suppose they don't carry the same signification,' said Dacier, in the
+tone of a pupil to such themes.
+
+'They carry no feeling,' said she.  'And that is my excuse for plucking
+these, where they seem to spring like our town-dream of happiness.  I
+believe they are sensible of it too; but these must do service to my
+invalid friend, who cannot travel.  Are you ever as much interested in
+the woes of great ladies as of country damsels?  I am not--not unless
+they have natural distinction.  You have met Lady Dunstane?'
+
+The question sounded artless.  Dacier answered that he thought he had
+seen her somewhere once, and Diana shut her lips on a rising under-smile.
+
+'She is the coeur d'or of our time; the one soul I would sacrifice these
+flowers to.'
+
+'A bit of a blue-stocking, I think I have heard said.'
+
+'She might have been admitted to the Hotel Rambouillet, without being
+anything of a Precieuse.  She is the woman of the largest heart now
+beating.'
+
+'Mr. Redworth talked of her.'
+
+'As she deserved, I am sure.'
+
+'Very warmly.'
+
+'He would!'
+
+'He told me you were the Damon and Pythias of women.'
+
+'Her one fault is an extreme humility that makes her always play second
+to me; and as I am apt to gabble, I take the lead; and I am froth in
+comparison.  I can reverence my superiors even when tried by intimacy
+with them.  She is the next heavenly thing to heaven that I know.  Court
+her, if ever you come across her.  Or have you a man's horror of women
+with brains?'
+
+'Am I expressing it?' said he.
+
+'Do not breathe London or Paris here on me.'  She fanned the crocuses
+under her chin.  'The early morning always has this--I wish I had a
+word!--touch .  .  . whisper .  .  . gleam .  .  . beat of wings--I envy
+poets now more than ever!--of Eden, I was going to say.  Prose can paint
+evening and moonlight, but poets are needed to sing the dawn.  That is
+because prose is equal to melancholy stuff.  Gladness requires the finer
+language.  Otherwise we have it coarse--anything but a reproduction.
+You politicians despise the little distinctions "twixt tweedledum and
+tweedledee," I fancy.'
+
+Of the poetic sort, Dacier's uncle certainly did.  For himself he
+confessed to not having thought much on them.
+
+'But how divine is utterance!' she said.  'As we to the brutes, poets are
+to us.'
+
+He listened somewhat with the head of the hanged.  A beautiful woman
+choosing to rhapsodize has her way, and is not subjected to the critical
+commentary within us.  He wondered whether she had discoursed in such a
+fashion to his uncle.
+
+'I can read good poetry,' said he.
+
+'If you would have this valley--or mountain-cleft, one should call it--
+described, only verse could do it for you,' Diana pursued, and stopped,
+glanced at his face, and smiled.  She had spied the end of a towel
+peeping out of one of his pockets.  'You came out for a bath!  Go back,
+by all means, and mount that rise of grass where you first saw me; and
+down on the other side, a little to the right, you will find the very
+place for a bath, at a corner of the rock--a natural fountain; a bubbling
+pool in a ring of brushwood, with falling water, so tempting that I could
+have pardoned a push: about five feet deep.  Lose no time.'
+
+He begged to assure her that he would rather stroll with her: it had been
+only a notion of bathing by chance when he pocketed the towel.
+
+'Dear me,' she cried, 'if I had been a man I should have scurried off at
+a signal of release, quick as a hare I once woke up in a field with my
+foot on its back.'
+
+Dacier's eyebrows knotted a trifle over her eagerness to dismiss him: he
+was not used to it, but rather to be courted by women, and to condescend.
+
+'I shall not long, I'm afraid, have the pleasure of walking beside you
+and hearing you.  I had letters at Lugano.  My uncle is unwell, I hear.'
+
+'Lord Dannisburgh?'
+
+The name sprang from her lips unhesitatingly.
+
+His nodded affirmative altered her face and her voice.
+
+'It is not a grave illness?'
+
+'They rather fear it.'
+
+'You had the news at Lugano?'
+
+He answered the implied reproach: 'I can be of no, service.'
+
+'But surely!'
+
+'It's even doubtful that he would be bothered to receive me.  We hold no
+views in common--excepting one.'
+
+'Could I?' she exclaimed.  'O that I might!  If he is really ill !  But
+if it is actually serious he would perhaps have a wish .  .  .  I can
+nurse.  I know I have the power to cheer him.  You ought indeed to be in
+England.'
+
+Dacier said he had thought it better to wait for later reports.  'I shall
+drive to Lugano this afternoon, and act on the information I get there.
+Probably it ends my holiday.'
+
+'Will you do me the favour to write me word?--and especially tell me if
+you think he would like to have me near him,' said Diana.  'And let him
+know that if he wants nursing or cheerful companionship, I am at any
+moment ready to come.'
+
+The flattery of a beautiful young woman to wait on him would be very
+agreeable to Lord Dannisburgh, Dacier conceived.  Her offer to go was
+possibly purely charitable.  But the prudence of her occupation of the
+post obscured whatever appeared admirable in her devotedness.  Her choice
+of a man like Lord Dannisburgh for the friend to whom she could sacrifice
+her good name less falteringly than she gathered those field-flowers was
+inexplicable; and she herself a darker riddle at each step of his
+reading.
+
+He promised curtly to write.  'I will do my best to hit a flying
+address.'
+
+'Your Club enables me to hit a permanent one that will establish the
+communication,' said Diana.  'We shall not sleep another night at Rovio.
+Lady Esquart is the lightest of sleepers, and if you had a restless time,
+she and her husband must have been in purgatory.  Besides, permit me to
+say, you should be with your party.  The times are troublous--not for
+holidays!  Your holiday has had a haunted look, creditably to your
+conscience as a politician.  These Corn Law agitations!'
+
+'Ah, but no politics here!' said Dacier.
+
+'Politics everywhere!--in the Courts of Faery!  They are not discord to
+me.'
+
+'But not the last day--the last hour!' he pleaded.
+
+'Well!  only do not forget your assurance to me that you would give some
+thoughts to Ireland--and the cause of women.  Has it slipped from your
+memory?'
+
+'If I see the chance of serving you, you may trust to me.'
+
+She sent up an interjection on the misfortune of her not having been born
+a man.
+
+It was to him the one smart of sourness in her charm as a woman.
+
+Among the boulder-stones of the ascent to the path, he ventured to
+propose a little masculine assistance in a hand stretched mutely.
+Although there was no great need for help, her natural kindliness checked
+the inclination to refuse it.  When their hands disjoined she found
+herself reddening.  She cast it on the exertion.  Her heart was
+throbbing.  It might be the exertion likewise.
+
+He walked and talked much more airily along the descending pathway,
+as if he had suddenly become more intimately acquainted with her.
+
+She listened, trying to think of the manner in which he might be taught
+to serve that cause she had at heart; and the colour deepened on her
+cheeks till it set fire to her underlying consciousness: blood to spirit.
+A tremour of alarm ran through her.
+
+His request for one of the crocuses to keep as a souvenir of the morning
+was refused.  'They are sacred; they were all devoted to my friend when I
+plucked them.'
+
+He pointed to a half-open one, with the petals in disparting pointing to
+junction, and compared it to the famous tiptoe ballet-posture, arms above
+head and fingers like swallows meeting in air, of an operatic danseuse of
+the time.
+
+'I do not see it, because I will not see it,' she said, and she found a
+personal cooling and consolement in the phrase.--We have this power of
+resisting invasion of the poetic by the commonplace, the spirit by the
+blood, if we please, though you men may not think that we have!  Her
+alarmed sensibilities bristled and made head against him as an enemy.
+She fancied (for the aforesaid reason--because she chose) that it was on
+account of the offence to her shy morning pleasure by his Londonizing.
+At any other moment her natural liveliness and trained social ease would
+have taken any remark on the eddies of the tide of converse; and so she
+told herself, and did not the less feel wounded, adverse, armed.  He
+seemed somehow--to have dealt a mortal blow to the happy girl she had
+become again.  The woman she was protested on behalf of the girl, while
+the girl in her heart bent lowered sad eyelids to the woman; and which of
+them was wiser of the truth she could not have said, for she was honestly
+not aware of the truth, but she knew she was divided in halves, with one
+half pitying the other, one rebuking: and all because of the incongruous
+comparison of a wild flower to an opera dancer!  Absurd indeed.  We human
+creatures are the silliest on earth, most certainly.
+
+Dacier had observed the blush, and the check to her flowing tongue did
+not escape him as they walked back to the inn down the narrow street of
+black rooms, where the women gossiped at the fountain and the cobbler
+threaded on his doorstep.  His novel excitement supplied the deficiency,
+sweeping him past minor reflections.  He was, however, surprised to hear
+her tell Lady Esquart, as soon as they were together at the breakfast-
+table, that he had the intention of starting for England; and further
+surprised, and slightly stung too, when on the poor lady's, moaning over
+her recollection of the midnight Bell, and vowing she could not attempt
+to sleep another night in the place, Diana declared her resolve to stay
+there one day longer with her maid, and explore the neighbourhood for the
+wild flowers in which it abounded.  Lord and Lady Esquart agreed to
+anything agreeable to her, after excusing themselves for the necessitated
+flight, piteously relating the story of their sufferings.  My lord could
+have slept, but he had remained awake to comfort my lady.
+
+'True knightliness!' Diana said, in praise of these long married lovers;
+and she asked them what they had talked of during the night.
+
+'You, my dear, partly,' said Lady Esquart.
+
+'For an opiate?'
+
+'An invocation of the morning,' said Dacier.
+
+Lady Esquart looked at Diana and, at him.  She thought it was well that
+her fair friend should stay.  It was then settled for Diana to rejoin
+them the next evening at Lugano, thence to proceed to Luino on the
+Maggiore.
+
+'I fear it is good-bye for me,' Dacier said to her, as he was about to
+step into the carriage with the Esquarts.
+
+'If you have not better news of your uncle, it must be,' she replied, and
+gave him her hand promptly and formally, hardly diverting her eyes from
+Lady Esquart to grace the temporary gift with a look.  The last of her he
+saw was a waving of her arm and finger pointing triumphantly at the Bell
+in the tower.  It said, to an understanding unpractised in the feminine
+mysteries: 'I can sleep through anything.'  What that revealed of her
+state of conscience and her nature, his efforts to preserve the lovely
+optical figure blocked his guessing.  He was with her friends, who liked
+her the more they knew her, and he was compelled to lean to their view of
+the perplexing woman.
+
+'She is a riddle to the world,' Lady Esquart said, 'but I know that she
+is good.  It is the best of signs when women take to her and are proud to
+be her friend.'
+
+My lord echoed his wife.  She talked in this homely manner to stop any
+notion of philandering that the young gentleman might be disposed to
+entertain in regard to a lady so attractive to the pursuit as Diana's
+beauty and delicate situation might make her seem.
+
+'She is an exceedingly clever person, and handsomer than report, which is
+uncommon,' said Dacier, becoming voluble on town-topics, Miss Asper
+incidentally among them.  He denied Lady Esquart's charge of an
+engagement; the matter hung.
+
+His letters at Lugano summoned him to England instantly.
+
+'I have taken leave of Mrs. Warwick, but tell her I regret, et caetera,'
+he said; 'and by the way, as my uncle's illness appears to be serious,
+the longer she is absent the better, perhaps.'
+
+'It would never do,' said Lady Esquart, understanding his drift
+immediately.  'We winter in Rome.  She will not abandon us--I have her
+word for it.  Next Easter we are in Paris; and so home, I suppose.  There
+will be no hurry before we are due at Cowes.  We seem to have become
+confirmed wanderers; for two of us at least it is likely to be our last
+great tour.'
+
+Dacier informed her that he had pledged his word to write to Mrs. Warwick
+of his uncle's condition, and the several appointed halting-places of the
+Esquarts between the lakes and Florence were named to him.  Thus all
+things were openly treated; all had an air of being on the surface; the
+communications passing between Mrs. Warwick and the Hon. Percy Dacier
+might have been perused by all the world.  None but that portion of it,
+sage in suspiciousness, which objects to such communications under any
+circumstances, could have detected in their correspondence a spark of
+coming fire or that there was common warmth.  She did not feel it, nor
+did he.  The position of the two interdicted it to a couple honourably
+sensible of social decencies; and who were, be it added, kept apart.
+The blood is the treacherous element in the story of the nobly civilized,
+of which secret Diana, a wife and no wife, a prisoner in liberty, a
+blooming woman imagining herself restored to transcendent maiden
+ecstacies--the highest youthful poetic--had received some faint
+intimation when the blush flamed suddenly in her cheeks and her heart
+knelled like the towers of a city given over to the devourer.  She had no
+wish to meet him again.  Without telling herself why, she would have
+shunned the meeting.  Disturbers that thwarted her simple happiness in
+sublime scenery were best avoided.  She thought so the more for a fitful
+blur to the simplicity of her sensations, and a task she sometimes had in
+restoring and toning them, after that sweet morning time in Rovio.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+'THE PRINCESS EGERIA'
+
+London, say what we will of it, is after all the head of the British
+giant, and if not the liveliest in bubbles, it is past competition the
+largest broth-pot of brains anywhere simmering on the hob: over the
+steadiest of furnaces too.  And the oceans and the continents, as you
+know, are perpetual and copious contributors, either to the heating
+apparatus or to the contents of the pot.  Let grander similes besought.
+This one fits for the smoky receptacle cherishing millions, magnetic to
+tens of millions more, with its caked outside of grime, and the inward
+substance incessantly kicking the lid, prankish, but never casting it
+off.  A good stew, you perceive; not a parlous boiling.  Weak as we may
+be in our domestic cookery, our political has been sagaciously adjusted
+as yet to catch the ardours of the furnace without being subject to their
+volcanic activities.
+
+That the social is also somewhat at fault, we have proof in occasional
+outcries over the absence of these or those particular persons famous for
+inspiriting.  It sticks and clogs.  The improvising songster is missed,
+the convivial essayist, the humorous Dean, the travelled cynic, and he,
+the one of his day, the iridescent Irishman, whose remembered repartees
+are a feast, sharp and ringing, at divers tables descending from the
+upper to the fat citizen's, where, instead of coming in the sequence of
+talk, they are exposed by blasting, like fossil teeth of old Deluge
+sharks in monotonous walls of our chalk-quarries.  Nor are these the less
+welcome for the violence of their introduction among a people glad to be
+set burning rather briskly awhile by the most unexpected of digs in the
+ribs.  Dan Merion, to give an example.  That was Dan Merion's joke with
+the watchman: and he said that other thing to the Marquis of Kingsbury,
+when the latter asked him if he had ever won a donkey-race.  And old Dan
+is dead, and we are the duller for it! which leads to the question: Is
+genius hereditary?  And the affirmative and negative are respectively
+maintained, rather against the Yes is the dispute, until a member of the
+audience speaks of Dan Merion's having left a daughter reputed for a
+sparkling wit not much below the level of his own.  Why, are you unaware
+that the Mrs. Warwick of that scandal case of Warwick versus Dannisburgh
+was old Dan Merion's girl--and his only child?  It is true; for a friend
+had it from a man who had it straight from Mr. Braddock, of the firm of
+Braddock, Thorpe and Simnel, her solicitors in the action, who told him
+he could sit listening to her for hours, and that she was as innocent as
+day; a wonderful combination of a good woman and a clever woman and a
+real beauty.  Only her misfortune was to have a furiously jealous
+husband, and they say he went mad after hearing the verdict.
+
+Diana was talked of in the London circles.  A witty woman is such salt
+that where she has once been tasted she must perforce be missed more than
+any of the absent, the dowering heavens not having yet showered her like
+very plentifully upon us.  Then it was first heard that Percy Dacier had
+been travelling with her.  Miss Asper heard of it.  Her uncle, Mr.
+Quintin Manx, the millionnaire, was an acquaintance of the new Judge
+and titled dignitary, Sir Cramborne Wathin, and she visited Lady Wathin,
+at whose table the report in the journals of the Nile-boat party was
+mentioned.  Lady Wathin's table could dispense with witty women, and,
+for that matter, witty men.  The intrusion of the spontaneous on the
+stereotyped would have clashed.  She preferred, as hostess, the old legal
+anecdotes sure of their laugh, and the citations from the manufactories
+of fun in the Press, which were current and instantly intelligible to all
+her guests.  She smiled suavely on an impromptu pun, because her
+experience of the humorous appreciation of it by her guests bade her
+welcome the upstart.  Nothing else impromptu was acceptable.  Mrs.
+Warwick therefore was not missed by Lady Wathin.  'I have met her,' she
+said.  'I confess I am not one of the fanatics about Mrs. Warwick.  She
+has a sort of skill in getting men to clamour.  If you stoop to tickle
+them, they will applaud.  It is a way of winning a reputation.'  When the
+ladies were separated from the gentlemen by the stream of Claret, Miss
+Asper heard Lady Wathin speak of Mrs. Warwick again.  An allusion to Lord
+Dannisburgh's fit of illness in the House of Lords led to her saying that
+there was no doubt he had been fascinated, and that, in her opinion, Mrs.
+Warwick was a dangerous woman.  Sir Cramborne knew something of Mr.
+Warwick; 'Poor man!' she added.  A lady present put a question concerning
+Mrs. Warwick's beauty.  'Yes,' Lady Wathin said, 'she has good looks to
+aid her.  Judging from what I hear and have seen, her thirst is for
+notoriety.  Sooner or later we shall have her making a noise, you may be
+certain.  Yes, she has the secret of dressing well--in the French style.'
+
+A simple newspaper report of the expedition of a Nileboat party could
+stir the Powers to take her up and turn her on their wheel in this
+manner.
+
+But others of the sons and daughters of London were regretting her
+prolonged absence.  The great and exclusive Whitmonby, who had dined once
+at Lady Wathin's table, and vowed never more to repeat that offence to
+his patience, lamented bitterly to Henry Wilmers that the sole woman
+worthy of sitting at a little Sunday evening dinner with the cream of the
+choicest men of the time was away wasting herself in that insane modern
+chase of the picturesque!  He called her a perverted Celimene.
+
+Redworth had less to regret than the rest of her male friends, as he was
+receiving at intervals pleasant descriptive letters, besides manuscript
+sheets of ANTONIA'S new piece of composition, to correct the proofs for
+the press, and he read them critically, he thought.  He read them with a
+watchful eye to guard them from the critics.  ANTONIA, whatever her
+faults as a writer, was not one of the order whose Muse is the Public
+Taste.  She did at least draw her inspiration from herself, and there was
+much to be feared in her work, if a sale was the object.  Otherwise
+Redworth's highly critical perusal led him flatly to admire.  This was
+like her, and that was like her, and here and there a phrase gave him the
+very play of her mouth, the flash of her eyes.  Could he possibly wish,
+or bear, to, have anything altered?  But she had reason to desire an
+extended sale of the work.  Her aim, in the teeth of her independent
+style, was at the means of independence--a feminine method of attempting
+to conciliate contraries; and after despatching the last sheets to the
+printer, he meditated upon the several ways which might serve to, assist
+her; the main way running thus in his mind:--We have a work of genius.
+Genius is good for the public.  What is good for the public should be
+recommended by the critics.  It should be.  How then to come at them to,
+get it done?  As he was not a member of the honourable literary craft,
+and regarded its arcana altogether externally, it may be confessed of him
+that he deemed the Incorruptible corruptible;--not, of course, with
+filthy coin slid into sticky palms.  Critics are human, and exceedingly,
+beyond the common lot, when touched; and they are excited by mysterious
+hints of loftiness in authorship; by rumours of veiled loveliness;
+whispers, of a general anticipation; and also Editors can jog them.
+Redworth was rising to be a Railway King of a period soon to glitter with
+rails, iron in the concrete, golden in the visionary.  He had already his
+Court, much against his will.  The powerful magnetic attractions of those
+who can help the world to fortune, was exercised by him in spite of his
+disgust of sycophants.  He dropped words to right and left of a coming
+work by ANTONIA.  And who was ANTONIA?--Ah! there hung the riddle.--An
+exalted personage?--So much so that he dared not name her even in
+confidence to ladies; he named the publishers.  To men he said he was at
+liberty to speak of her only as the most beautiful woman of her time.
+His courtiers of both sexes were recommended to read the new story, THE
+PRINCESS EGERIA.
+
+Oddly, one great lady of his Court had heard a forthcoming work of this
+title spoken of by Percy Dacier, not a man to read silly fiction, unless
+there was meaning behind the lines: that is, rich scandal of the
+aristocracy, diversified by stinging epigrams to the address of
+discernible personages.  She talked of THE PRINCESS EGERIA: nay, laid her
+finger on the identical Princess.  Others followed her.  Dozens were soon
+flying with the torch: a new work immediately to be published from the
+pen of the Duchess of Stars!--And the Princess who lends her title to the
+book is a living portrait of the Princess of Highest Eminence, the Hope
+of all Civilization.--Orders for copies of THE PRINCESS EGERIA reached
+the astonished publishers before the book was advertized.
+
+Speaking to editors, Redworth complimented them with friendly intimations
+of the real authorship of the remarkable work appearing.  He used a
+certain penetrative mildness of tone in saying that 'he hoped the book
+would succeed': it deserved to; it was original; but the originality
+might tell against it.  All would depend upon a favourable launching of
+such a book.  'Mrs. Warwick?  Mrs. Warwick?' said the most influential of
+editors, Mr. Marcus Tonans; 'what! that singularly handsome woman?  .  .
+The Dannisburgh affair?  .  .  .  She's Whitmonby's heroine.  If she
+writes as cleverly as she talks, her work is worth trumpeting.'  He
+promised to see that it went into good hands for the review, and a prompt
+review--an essential point; none of your long digestions of the contents.
+
+Diana's indefatigable friend had fair assurances that her book would be
+noticed before it dropped dead to the public appetite for novelty.  He
+was anxious next, notwithstanding his admiration of the originality of
+the conception and the cleverness of the writing, lest the Literary
+Reviews should fail 'to do it justice': he used the term; for if they
+wounded her, they would take the pleasure out of success; and he had
+always present to him that picture of the beloved woman kneeling at the
+fire-grate at The Crossways, which made the thought of her suffering any
+wound his personal anguish, so crucially sweet and saintly had her image
+then been stamped on him.  He bethought him, in consequence, while
+sitting in the House of Commons; engaged upon the affairs of the nation,
+and honestly engaged, for he was a vigilant worker--that the Irish
+Secretary, Charles Raiser, with whom he stood in amicable relations,
+had an interest, to the extent of reputed ownership, in the chief of the
+Literary Reviews.  He saw Raiser on the benches, and marked him to speak
+for him.  Looking for him shortly afterward, the man was gone.  'Off to
+the Opera, if he's not too late for the drop,' a neighbour said, smiling
+queerly, as though he ought to know; and then Redworth recollected
+current stories of Raiser's fantastical devotion to the popular prima
+donna of the angelical voice.--He hurried to the Opera and met the vomit,
+and heard in the crushroom how divine she had been that night.  A fellow
+member of the House, tolerably intimate with Raiser, informed him,
+between frightful stomachic roulades of her final aria, of the likeliest
+place where Raiser might be found when the Opera was over: not at his
+Club, nor at his chambers: on one of the bridges--Westminster,
+he fancied.
+
+There was no need for Redworth to run hunting the man at so late an hour,
+but he was drawn on by the similarity in dissimilarity of this devotee of
+a woman, who could worship her at a distance, and talk of her to
+everybody.  Not till he beheld Raiser's tall figure cutting the bridge-
+parapet, with a star over his shoulder, did he reflect on the views the
+other might entertain of the nocturnal solicitation to see 'justice done'
+to a lady's new book in a particular Review, and the absurd outside of
+the request was immediately smothered by the natural simplicity and
+pressing necessity of its inside.
+
+He crossed the road and said, 'Ah?' in recognition.  'Were you at the
+Opera this evening?'
+
+'Oh, just at the end,' said Raiser, pacing forward.  'It's a fine night.
+Did you hear her?'
+
+'No; too late.'
+
+Raiser pressed ahead, to meditate by himself, as was his wont.  Finding
+Redworth beside him, he monologuized in his depths: 'They'll kill her.
+She puts her soul into it, gives her blood.  There 's no failing of the
+voice.  You see how it wears her.  She's doomed.  Half a year's rest on
+Como .  .  .  somewhere .  .  . she might be saved!  She won't refuse to
+work.'
+
+'Have you spoken to her?' said Redworth.
+
+'And next to Berlin!  Vienna!  A horse would be . . . .
+
+I?  I don't know her,' Raiser replied.  'Some of their women stand it.
+She's delicately built.  You can't treat a lute like a drum without
+destroying the instrument.  We look on at a murder!'
+
+The haggard prospect from that step of the climax checked his delivery.
+
+Redworth knew him to be a sober man in office, a man with a head for
+statecraft: he had made a weighty speech in the House a couple of hours
+back.  This Opera cantatrice, no beauty, though gentle, thrilling,
+winning, was his corner of romance.
+
+'Do you come here often?' he asked.
+
+'Yes, I can't sleep.'
+
+'London at night, from the bridge, looks fine.  By the way .  .  .'
+
+'It 's lonely here, that's the advantage,' said Rainer; 'I keep silver in
+my pocket for poor girls going to their homes, and I'm left in peace.  An
+hour later, there's the dawn down yonder.'
+
+'By the way,' Redworth interposed, and was told that after these nights
+of her singing she never slept till morning.  He swallowed the fact,
+sympathized, and resumed: 'I want a small favour.'
+
+'No business here, please!'
+
+'Not a bit of it.  You know Mrs. Warwick.  .  .  .  You know of her.
+She 's publishing a book.  I want you to use your influence to get it
+noticed quickly, if you can.'
+
+'Warwick?  Oh, yes, a handsome woman.  Ah, yes; the Dannisburgh affair,
+yes.  What did I hear!--They say she 's thick with Percy Dacier at
+present.  Who was talking of her!  Yes, old Lady Dacier.  So she 's a
+friend of yours?'
+
+'She's an old friend,' said Redworth, composing himself; for the dose he
+had taken was not of the sweetest, and no protestations could be uttered
+by a man of the world to repel a charge of tattlers.  'The truth is, her
+book is clever.  I have read the proofs.  She must have an income, and
+she won't apply to her husband, and literature should help her, if she 's
+fairly treated.  She 's Irish by descent; Merion's daughter, witty as her
+father.  It's odd you haven't met her.  The mere writing of the book is
+extraordinarily good.  If it 's put into capable hands for review!
+that's all it requires.  And full of life .  .  .  bright dialogue .  .
+capital sketches.  The book's a piece of literature.  Only it must have
+competent critics!'
+
+So he talked while Rainer ejaculated: 'Warwick?  Warwick?' in the
+irritating tone of dozens of others.  'What did I hear of her husband?
+He has a post .  .  .  .  Yes, yes.  Some one said the verdict in that
+case knocked him over--heart disease, or something.'
+
+He glanced at the dark Thames water.  'Take my word for it, the groves of
+Academe won't compare with one of our bridges at night, if you seek
+philosophy.  You see the London above and the London below: round us the
+sleepy city, and the stars in the water looking like souls of suicides.
+I caught a girl with a bad fit on her once.  I had to lecture her!
+It's when we become parsons we find out our cousinship with these poor
+peripatetics, whose "last philosophy" is a jump across the parapet.  The
+bridge at night is a bath for a public man.  But choose another; leave me
+mine.'
+
+Redworth took the hint.  He stated the title of Mrs. Warwick's book, and
+imagined from the thoughtful cast of Rainer's head, that he was
+impressing THE PRINCESS EGERIA On his memory.
+
+Rainer burst out, with clenched fists: 'He beats her!  The fellow lives
+on her and beats her; strikes that woman!  He drags her about to every
+Capital in Europe to make money for him, and the scoundrel pays her with
+blows.'
+
+In the course of a heavy tirade against the scoundrel, Redworth
+apprehended that it was the cantatrice's husband.  He expressed his
+horror and regret; paused, and named THE PRINCESS EGERIA and a certain
+Critical Review.  Another outburst seemed to be in preparation.  Nothing
+further was to be done for the book at that hour.  So, with a blunt 'Good
+night,' he left Charles Rainer pacing, and thought on his walk home of
+the strange effects wrought by women unwittingly upon men (Englishmen);
+those women, or some of them, as little knowing it as the moon her
+traditional influence upon the tides.  He thought of Percy Dacier too.
+In his bed he could have wished himself peregrinating a bridge.
+
+The PRINCESS EGERIA appeared, with the reviews at her heels, a pack of
+clappers, causing her to fly over editions clean as a doe the gates and
+hedges--to quote Mr. Sullivan Smith, who knew not a sentence of the work
+save what he gathered of it from Redworth, at their chance meeting on
+Piccadilly pavement, and then immediately he knew enough to blow his
+huntsman's horn in honour of the sale.  His hallali rang high.  'Here's
+another Irish girl to win their laurels!  'Tis one of the blazing
+successes.  A most enthralling work, beautifully composed.  And where is
+she now, Mr. Redworth, since she broke away from that husband of hers,
+that wears the clothes of the worst tailor ever begotten by a thread
+on a needle, as I tell every soul of 'em in my part of the country?'
+
+'You have seen him?' said Redworth.
+
+'Why, sir, wasn't he on show at the Court he applied to for relief and
+damages?  as we heard when we were watching the case daily, scarce
+drawing our breath for fear the innocent--and one of our own blood, would
+be crushed.  Sure, there he stood; ay, and looking the very donkey for a
+woman to flip off her fingers, like the dust from my great uncle's prise
+of snuff!  She's a glory to the old country.  And better you than
+another, I'd say, since it wasn't an Irishman to have her: but what
+induced the dear lady to take him, is the question we 're all of us
+asking!  And it's mournful to think that somehow you contrive to get the
+pick of us in the girls!  If ever we 're united, 'twill be by a trick of
+circumvention of that sort, pretty sure.  There's a turn in the market
+when they shut their eyes and drop to the handiest: and London's a vortex
+that poor dear dull old Dublin can't compete with.  I 'll beg you for the
+address of the lady her friend, Lady Dunstane.'
+
+Mr. Sullivan Smith walked with Redworth through the park to the House of
+Commons, discoursing of Rails and his excellent old friend's rise to the
+top rung of the ladder and Beanstalk land, so elevated that one had to
+look up at him with watery eyes, as if one had flung a ball at the
+meridian sun.  Arrived at famed St. Stephen's, he sent in his compliments
+to the noble patriot and accepted an invitation to dinner.
+
+'And mind you read THE PRINCESS EGERIA,' said Redworth.
+
+'Again and again, my friend.  The book is bought.'  Sullivan Smith
+slapped his breastpocket.
+
+'There's a bit of Erin in it.'
+
+'It sprouts from Erin.'
+
+'Trumpet it.'
+
+'Loud as cavalry to the charge!'
+
+Once with the title stamped on his memory, the zealous Irishman might be
+trusted to become an ambulant advertizer.  Others, personal friends,
+adherents, courtiers of Redworth's, were active.  Lady Pennon and Henry
+Wilmers, in the upper circle; Whitmonby and Westlake, in the literary;
+spread the fever for this new book.  The chief interpreter of public
+opinion caught the way of the wind and headed the gale.
+
+Editions of the book did really run like fires in summer furze; and to
+such an extent that a simple literary performance grew to be respected in
+Great Britain, as representing Money.
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+
+
+A kindly sense of superiority
+By resisting, I made him a tyrant
+Carry explosives and must particularly guard against sparks
+Depending for dialogue upon perpetual fresh supplies of scandal
+Dose he had taken was not of the sweetest
+Friendship, I fancy, means one heart between two
+He was the maddest of tyrants--a weak one
+He, by insisting, made me a rebel
+Her feelings--trustier guides than her judgement in this crisis
+I do not see it, because I will not see it
+Inducement to act the hypocrite before the hypocrite world
+Insistency upon there being two sides to a case--to every case
+Intrusion of the spontaneous on the stereotyped would clash
+Irony that seemed to spring from aversion
+It is the best of signs when women take to her
+Mistaking of her desires for her reasons
+Mutual deference
+Never fell far short of outstripping the sturdy pedestrian Time
+Observation is the most, enduring of the pleasures of life
+One might build up a respectable figure in negatives
+Openly treated; all had an air of being on the surface
+Owner of such a woman, and to lose her!
+Paint themselves pure white, to the obliteration of minor spots
+Quixottry is agreeable reading, a silly performance
+Real happiness is a state of dulness
+Reluctant to take the life of flowers for a whim
+Rewards, together with the expectations, of the virtuous
+Sleepless night
+Smoky receptacle cherishing millions
+Terrible decree, that all must act who would prevail
+Vowed never more to repeat that offence to his patience
+Was not one of the order whose Muse is the Public Taste
+Wife and no wife, a prisoner in liberty
+Women are taken to be the second thoughts of the Creator
+World is ruthless, dear friends, because the world is hypocrite
+World prefers decorum to honesty
+Yawns coming alarmingly fast, in the place of ideas
+
+
+
+
+[The End]
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 4466 ***
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Diana of the Crossways, v2,
+by George Meredith
+#72 in our series by George Meredith
+
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+
+Title: Diana of the Crossways, v2
+
+Author: George Meredith
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+Release Date: September, 2003 [Etext #4466]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on February 12, 2002]
+
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Diana of the Crossways, v2, by Meredith
+*********This file should be named 4466.txt or 4466.zip*********
+
+This etext was produced by David Widger <widger@cecomet.net>
+
+Project Gutenberg Etexts are often created from several printed
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+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we usually do not
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+
+The "legal small print" and other information about this book
+may now be found at the end of this file.  Please read this
+important information, as it gives you specific rights and
+tells you about restrictions in how the file may be used.
+
+
+
+
+
+[NOTE: There is a short list of bookmarks, or pointers, at the end of the
+file for those who may wish to sample the author's ideas before making an
+entire meal of them.  D.W.]
+
+
+
+
+
+DIANA OF THE CROSSWAYS
+
+By George Meredith
+
+1897
+
+
+
+BOOK 2.
+
+IX.       SHOWS HOW A POSITION OF DELICACY FOR A LADY AND GENTLEMAN WAS
+          MET IN SIMPLE FASHION WITHOUT HURT TO EITHER.
+X.        THE CONFLICT OF THE NIGHT
+XI.       RECOUNTS THE JOURNEY IN A CHARIOT, WITH A CERTAIN AMOUNT OF
+          DIALOGUE, AND A SMALL INCIDENT ON THE ROAD
+XII.      BETWEEN EMMA AND DIANA
+XIII.     TOUCHING THE FIRST DAYS OF HER PROBATION
+XIV.      GIVING GLIMPSES OF DIANA UNDER HER CLOUD BEFORE THE WORLD AND
+          OF HER FURTHER APPRENTICESHIP
+XV.       INTRODUCES THE HON. PERCY DACIER
+XVI.      TREATS OF A MIDNIGHT BELL, AND OF A SCENE OF EARLY MORNING
+XVII.     THE PRINCESS EGERIA
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+SHOWS HOW A POSITION OF DELICACY FOR A LADY AND GENTLEMAN WAS MET IN
+SIMPLE FASHION WITHOUT HURT TO EITHER
+
+Redworth's impulse was to laugh for very gladness of heart, as he
+proffered excuses for his tremendous alarums and in doing so, the worthy
+gentleman imagined he must have persisted in clamouring for admission
+because he suspected, that if at home, she would require a violent
+summons to betray herself.  It was necessary to him to follow his
+abashed sagacity up to the mark of his happy animation.
+
+'Had I known it was you!' said Diana, bidding him enter the passage.
+She wore a black silk mantilla and was warmly covered.
+
+She called to her maid Danvers, whom Redworth remembered: a firm woman of
+about forty, wrapped, like her mistress, in head-covering, cloak, scarf
+and shawl.  Telling her to scour the kitchen for firewood, Diana led into
+a sitting-room.  'I need not ask--you have come from Lady Dunstane,' she
+said.  'Is she well?'
+
+'She is deeply anxious.'
+
+'You are cold.  Empty houses are colder than out of doors.  You shall
+soon have a fire.'
+
+She begged him to be seated.
+
+The small glow of candle-light made her dark rich colouring orange in
+shadow.
+
+'House and grounds are open to a tenant,' she resumed.  'I say good-bye
+to them to-morrow morning.  The old couple who are in charge sleep in the
+village to-night.  I did not want them here.  You have quitted the
+Government service, I think?'
+
+'A year or so since.'
+
+'When did you return from America?'
+
+'Two days back.'
+
+'And paid your visit to Copsley immediately?'
+
+'As early as I could.'
+
+'That was true friendliness.  You have a letter for me?'
+
+'I have.'
+
+He put his hand to his pocket for the letter.
+
+'Presently,' she said.  She divined the contents, and nursed her
+resolution to withstand them.  Danvers had brought firewood and coal.
+Orders were given to her, and in spite of the opposition of the maid
+and intervention of the gentleman, Diana knelt at the grate, observing:
+
+'Allow me to do this.  I can lay and light a fire.'
+
+He was obliged to look on: she was a woman who spoke her meaning.  She
+knelt, handling paper, firewood and matches, like a housemaid.  Danvers
+proceeded on her mission, and Redworth eyed Diana in the first fire-glow.
+He could have imagined a Madonna on an old black Spanish canvas.
+
+The act of service was beautiful in gracefulness, and her simplicity in
+doing the work touched it spiritually.  He thought, as she knelt there,
+that never had he seen how lovely and how charged with mystery her
+features were; the dark large eyes full on the brows; the proud line of
+a straight nose in right measure to the bow of the lips; reposeful red
+lips, shut, and their curve of the slumber-smile at the corners.  Her
+forehead was broad; the chin of a sufficient firmness to sustain: that
+noble square; the brows marked by a soft thick brush to the temples; her
+black hair plainly drawn along her head to the knot, revealed by the
+mantilla fallen on her neck.
+
+Elegant in plainness, the classic poet would have said of her hair and
+dress.  She was of the women whose wits are quick in everything they do.
+That which was proper to her position, complexion, and the hour, surely
+marked her appearance.  Unaccountably this night, the fair fleshly
+presence over-weighted her intellectual distinction, to an observer bent
+on vindicating her innocence.  Or rather, he saw the hidden in the
+visible.
+
+Owner of such a woman, and to lose her!  Redworth pitied the husband.
+
+The crackling flames reddened her whole person.  Gazing, he remembered
+Lady Dunstane saying of her once, that in anger she had the nostrils of a
+war-horse.  The nostrils now were faintly alive under some sensitive
+impression of her musings.  The olive cheeks, pale as she stood in the
+doorway, were flushed by the fire-beams, though no longer with their
+swarthy central rose, tropic flower of a pure and abounding blood, as it
+had seemed.  She was now beset by battle.  His pity for her, and his
+eager championship, overwhelmed the spirit of compassion for the foolish
+wretched husband.  Dolt, the man must be, Redworth thought; and he asked
+inwardly, Did the miserable tyrant suppose of a woman like this, that
+she would be content to shine as a candle in a grated lanthorn?
+The generosity of men speculating upon other men's possessions is known.
+Yet the man who loves a woman has to the full the husband's jealousy
+of her good name.  And a lover, that without the claims of the alliance,
+can be wounded on her behalf, is less distracted in his homage by the
+personal luminary, to which man's manufacture of balm and incense is
+mainly drawn when his love is wounded.  That contemplation of her
+incomparable beauty, with the multitude of his ideas fluttering round it,
+did somewhat shake the personal luminary in Redworth.  He was conscious
+of pangs.  The question bit him: How far had she been indiscreet or
+wilful? and the bite of it was a keen acid to his nerves.  A woman
+doubted by her husband, is always, and even to her champions in the first
+hours of the noxious rumour, until they had solidified in confidence
+through service, a creature of the wilds, marked for our ancient running.
+Nay, more than a cynical world, these latter will be sensible of it.  The
+doubt casts her forth, the general yelp drags her down; she runs like the
+prey of the forest under spotting branches; clear if we can think so, but
+it has to be thought in devotedness: her character is abroad.  Redworth
+bore a strong resemblance to, his fellowmen, except for his power of
+faith in this woman.  Nevertheless it required the superbness of her
+beauty and the contrasting charm of her humble posture of kneeling by the
+fire, to set him on his right track of mind.  He knew and was sure of
+her.  He dispersed the unhallowed fry in attendance upon any stirring of
+the reptile part of us, to look at her with the eyes of a friend.  And if
+.  .  .  !--a little mouse of a thought scampered out of one of the
+chambers of his head and darted along the passages, fetching a sweat to
+his brows.  Well, whatsoever the fact, his heart was hers!  He hoped he
+could be charitable to women.
+
+She rose from her knees and said: 'Now, please, give me the letter.'
+
+He was entreated to excuse her for consigning him to firelight when she
+left the room.
+
+Danvers brought in a dismal tallow candle, remarking that her mistress
+had not expected visitors: her mistress had nothing but tea and bread and
+butter to offer him.  Danvers uttered no complaint of her sufferings;
+happy in being the picture of them.  'I'm not hungry,' said he.
+
+A plate of Andrew Hedger's own would not have tempted him.  The foolish
+frizzle of bacon sang in his ears as he walked from end to end of the
+room; an illusion of his fancy pricked by a frost-edged appetite.  But
+the anticipated contest with Diana checked and numbed the craving.
+
+Was Warwick a man to proceed to extremities on a mad suspicion?--What
+kind of proof had he?
+
+Redworth summoned the portrait of Mr. Warwick before him, and beheld a
+sweeping of close eyes in cloud, a long upper lip in cloud; the rest of
+him was all cloud.  As usual with these conjurations of a face, the index
+of the nature conceived by him displayed itself, and no more; but he took
+it for the whole physiognomy, and pronounced of the husband thus
+delineated, that those close eyes of the long upper lip would both
+suspect and proceed madly.
+
+He was invited by Danvers to enter the dining-room.
+
+There Diana joined him.
+
+'The best of a dinner on bread and butter is, that one is ready for
+supper soon after it,' she said, swimming to the tea-tray.  'You have
+dined?'
+
+'At the inn,' he replied.
+
+'The Three Ravens!  When my father's guests from London flooded The
+Crossways, The Three Ravens provided the overflow with beds.  On nights
+like this I have got up and scraped the frost from my window-panes to see
+them step into the old fly, singing some song of his.  The inn had a good
+reputation for hospitality in those days.  I hope they treated you well?'
+
+'Excellently,' said Redworth, taking an enormous mouthful, while his
+heart sank to see that she who smiled to encourage his eating had been
+weeping.  But she also consumed her bread and butter.
+
+'That poor maid of mine is an instance of a woman able to do things
+against the grain,' she said.  'Danvers is a foster-child of luxury.
+She loves it; great houses, plentiful meals, and the crowd of twinkling
+footmen's calves.  Yet you see her here in a desolate house, consenting
+to cold, and I know not what, terrors of ghosts! poor soul.  I have some
+mysterious attraction for her.  She would not let me come alone.
+I should have had to hire some old Storling grannam, or retain the
+tattling keepers of the house.  She loves her native country too, and
+disdains the foreigner.  My tea you may trust.'
+
+Redworth had not a doubt of it.  He was becoming a tea-taster.  The merit
+of warmth pertained to the beverage.  'I think you get your tea from
+Scoppin's, in the City,' he said.
+
+That was the warehouse for Mrs. Warwick's tea.  They conversed of Teas;
+the black, the green, the mixtures; each thinking of the attack to come,
+and the defence.  Meantime, the cut bread and butter having flown,
+Redwerth attacked the loaf.  He apologized.
+
+'Oh! pay me a practical compliment,' Diana said, and looked really happy
+at his unfeigned relish of her simple fare.
+
+She had given him one opportunity in speaking of her maid's love of
+native country.  But it came too early.
+
+'They say that bread and butter is fattening,' he remarked.
+
+'You preserve the mean,' said she.
+
+He admitted that his health was good.  For some little time, to his
+vexation at the absurdity, she kept him talking of himself.  So flowing
+was she, and so sweet the motion of her mouth in utterance, that he
+followed her lead, and he said odd things and corrected them.  He had to
+describe his ride to her.
+
+'Yes! the view of the Downs from Dewhurst,' she exclaimed.  'Or any point
+along the ridge.  Emma and I once drove there in Summer, with clotted
+cream from her dairy, and we bought fresh-plucked wortleberries, and
+stewed them in a hollow of the furzes, and ate them with ground biscuits
+and the clotted cream iced, and thought it a luncheon for seraphs.  Then
+you dropped to the road round under the sand-heights--and meditated
+railways!'
+
+'Just a notion or two.'
+
+'You have been very successful in America?'
+
+'Successful; perhaps; we exclude extremes in our calculations of the
+still problematical.'
+
+'I am sure,' said she, 'you always have faith in your calculations.'
+
+Her innocent archness dealt him a stab sharper than any he had known
+since the day of his hearing of her engagement.  He muttered of his
+calculations being human; he was as much of a fool as other men--more!
+
+'Oh! no,' said she.
+
+'Positively.'
+
+'I cannot think it.'
+
+'I know it.'
+
+'Mr. Redworth, you will never persuade me to believe it.'
+
+He knocked a rising groan on the head, and rejoined 'I hope I may not
+have to say so to-night.'
+
+Diana felt the edge of the dart.  'And meditating railways, you scored
+our poor land of herds and flocks; and night fell, and the moon sprang
+up, and on you came.  It was clever of you to find your way by the
+moonbeams.'
+
+'That's about the one thing I seem fit for!'
+
+'But what delusion is this, in the mind of a man succeeding in everything
+he does!' cried Diana, curious despite her wariness.  'Is there to be the
+revelation of a hairshirt ultimately?--a Journal of Confessions?  You
+succeeded in everything you aimed at, and broke your heart over one
+chance miss?'
+
+'My heart is not of the stuff to break,' he said, and laughed off her
+fortuitous thrust straight into it.  'Another cup, yes.  I came .  .  .'
+
+'By night,' said she, 'and cleverly found your way, and dined at The
+Three Ravens, and walked to The Crossways, and met no ghosts.'
+
+'On the contrary--or at least I saw a couple.'
+
+'Tell me of them; we breed them here.  We sell them periodically to the
+newspapers!'
+
+'Well, I started them in their natal locality.  I saw them, going down
+the churchyard, and bellowed after them with all my lungs.  I wanted
+directions to The Crossways; I had missed my way at some turning.  In an
+instant they were vapour.'
+
+Diana smiled.  'It was indeed a voice to startle delicate apparitions!
+So do roar Hyrcanean tigers.  Pyramus and Thisbe--slaying lions!  One
+of your ghosts carried a loaf of bread, and dropped it in fright; one
+carried a pound of fresh butter for home consumption.  They were in the
+churchyard for one in passing to kneel at her father's grave and kiss his
+tombstone.'
+
+She bowed her head, forgetful of her guard.
+
+The pause presented an opening.  Redworth left his chair and walked to
+the mantelpiece.  It was easier to him to speak, not facing her.
+
+'You have read Lady Dunstane's letter,' he began.
+
+She nodded.  'I have.'
+
+'Can you resist her appeal to you?'
+
+'I must.'
+
+'She is not in a condition to bear it well.  You will pardon me, Mrs.
+Warwick .  .  .'
+
+'Fully! Fully!'
+
+'I venture to offer merely practical advice.  You have thought of it all,
+but have not felt it.  In these cases, the one thing to do is to make a
+stand.  Lady Dunstane has a clear head.  She sees what has to be endured
+by you.  Consider: she appeals to me to bring you her letter.  Would she
+have chosen me, or any man, for her messenger, if it had not appeared to
+her a matter of life and death?  You count me among your friends.'
+
+'One of the truest.'
+
+'Here are two, then, and your own good sense.  For I do not believe it
+to be a question of courage.'
+
+'He has commenced.  Let him carry it out,' said Diana.
+
+Her desperation could have added the cry--And give me freedom!  That was
+the secret in her heart.  She had struck on the hope for the detested
+yoke to be broken at any cost.
+
+'I decline to meet his charges.  I despise them.  If my friends have
+faith in me--and they may!--I want nothing more.'
+
+'Well, I won't talk commonplaces about the world,' said Redworth.
+'We can none of us afford to have it against us.  Consider a moment: to
+your friends you are the Diana Merion they knew, and they will not suffer
+an injury to your good name without a struggle.  But if you fly?  You
+leave the dearest you have to the whole brunt of it.
+
+'They will, if they love me.'
+
+'They will.  But think of the shock to her.  Lady Dunstane reads you--'
+
+'Not quite.  No, not if she even wishes me to stay!' said Diana.
+
+He was too intent on his pleading to perceive a signification.
+
+'She reads you as clearly in the dark as if you were present with her.'
+
+'Oh!  why am I not ten years older!'  Diana cried, and tried to face
+round to him, and stopped paralyzed.  'Ten years older, I could discuss
+my situation, as an old woman of the world, and use my wits to defend
+myself.'
+
+'And then you would not dream of flight before it!'
+
+'No, she does not read me: no!  She saw that I might come to The
+Crossways.  She--no one but myself can see the wisdom of my holding
+aloof, in contempt of this baseness.'
+
+'And of allowing her to sink under that which your presence would arrest.
+Her strength will not support it.'
+
+'Emma!  Oh, cruel!' Diana sprang up to give play to her limbs.  She
+dropped on another chair.  'Go I must, I cannot turn back.  She saw my
+old attachment to this place.  It was not difficult to guess .  .  .
+Who but I can see the wisest course for me!'
+
+'It comes to this, that the blow aimed at you in your absence will strike
+her, and mortally,' said Redworth.
+
+'Then I say it is terrible to have a friend,' said Diana, with her bosom
+heaving.
+
+'Friendship, I fancy, means one heart between two.'
+
+His unstressed observation hit a bell in her head, and set it
+reverberating.  She and Emma had spoken, written, the very words.  She
+drew forth her Emma's letter from under her left breast, and read some
+half-blinded lines.
+
+Redworth immediately prepared to leave her to her feelings--trustier
+guides than her judgement in this crisis.
+
+'Adieu, for the night, Mrs. Warwick,' he said, and was guilty of
+eulogizing the judgement he thought erratic for the moment.  'Night is a
+calm adviser.  Let me presume to come again in the morning.  I dare not
+go back without you.'
+
+She looked up.  As they faced together each saw that the other had passed
+through a furnace, scorching enough to him, though hers was the delicacy
+exposed.  The reflection had its weight with her during the night.
+
+'Danvers is getting ready a bed for you; she is airing linen,' Diana,
+said.  But the bed was declined, and the hospitality was not pressed.
+The offer of it seemed to him significant of an unwary cordiality and
+thoughtlessness of tattlers that might account possibly for many things--
+supposing a fool or madman, or malignants, to interpret them.
+
+'Then, good night,' said she.
+
+They joined hands.  He exacted no promise that she would be present in
+the morning to receive him; and it was a consolation to her desire for
+freedom, until she reflected on the perfect confidence it implied, and
+felt as a quivering butterfly impalpably pinned.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+THE CONFLICT OF THE NIGHT
+
+Her brain was a steam-wheel throughout the night; everything that could
+be thought of was tossed, nothing grasped.
+
+The unfriendliness of the friends who sought to retain her recurred.  For
+look--to fly could not be interpreted as a flight.  It was but a stepping
+aside, a disdain of defending herself, and a wrapping herself in her
+dignity.  Women would be with her.  She called on the noblest of them to
+justify the course she chose, and they did, in an almost audible murmur.
+
+And O the rich reward.  A black archway-gate swung open to the glittering
+fields of freedom.
+
+Emma was not of the chorus.  Emma meditated as an invalid.  How often had
+Emma bewailed to her that the most, grievous burden of her malady was her
+fatal tendency to brood sickly upon human complications!  She could not
+see the blessedness of the prospect of freedom to a woman abominably
+yoked.  What if a miserable woman were dragged through mire to reach it!
+Married, the mire was her portion, whatever she might do.  That man--but
+pass him!
+
+And that other--the dear, the kind, careless, high-hearted old friend.
+He could honestly protest his guiltlessness, and would smilingly leave
+the case to go its ways.  Of this she was sure, that her decision and her
+pleasure would be his.  They were tied to the stake.  She had already
+tasted some of the mortal agony.  Did it matter whether the flames
+consumed her?
+
+Reflecting on the interview with Redworth, though she had performed her
+part in it placidly, her skin burned.  It was the beginning of tortures
+if she stayed in England.
+
+By staying to defend herself she forfeited her attitude of dignity and
+lost all chance of her reward.  And name the sort of world it is, dear
+friends, for which we are to sacrifice our one hope of freedom, that we
+may preserve our fair fame in it!
+
+Diana cried aloud, 'My freedom!' feeling as a butterfly flown out of a
+box to stretches of sunny earth beneath spacious heavens.  Her bitter
+marriage, joyless in all its chapters, indefensible where the man was
+right as well as where insensately wrong, had been imprisonment.  She
+excused him down to his last madness, if only the bonds were broken.
+Here, too, in this very house of her happiness with her father, she had
+bound herself to the man voluntarily, quite inexplicably.  Voluntarily,
+as we say.  But there must be a spell upon us at times.  Upon young women
+there certainly is.
+
+The wild brain of Diana, armed by her later enlightenment as to the laws
+of life and nature, dashed in revolt at the laws of the world when she
+thought of the forces, natural and social, urging young women to marry
+and be bound to the end.
+
+It should be a spotless world which is thus ruthless.
+
+But were the world impeccable it would behave more generously.
+
+The world is ruthless, dear friends, because the world is hypocrite!
+The world cannot afford to be magnanimous, or even just.
+
+Her dissensions with her husband, their differences of opinion, and puny
+wranglings, hoistings of two standards, reconciliations for the sake of
+decency, breaches of the truce, and his detested meanness, the man behind
+the mask; and glimpses of herself too, the half-known, half-suspected,
+developing creature claiming to be Diana, and unlike her dreamed Diana,
+deformed by marriage, irritable, acerb, rebellious, constantly
+justifiable against him, but not in her own mind, and therefore accusing
+him of the double crime of provoking her and perverting her--these were
+the troops defiling through her head while she did battle with the
+hypocrite world.
+
+One painful sting was caused by the feeling that she could have loved--
+whom?  An ideal.  Had he, the imagined but unvisioned, been her yoke-
+fellow, would she now lie raising caged-beast cries in execration of the
+yoke?  She would not now be seeing herself as hare, serpent, tigress!
+The hypothesis was reviewed in negatives: she had barely a sense of
+softness, just a single little heave of the bosom, quivering upward and
+leadenly sinking, when she glanced at a married Diana heartily mated.
+The regrets of the youthful for a life sailing away under medical
+sentence of death in the sad eyes of relatives resemble it.  She could
+have loved.  Good-bye to that!
+
+A woman's brutallest tussle with the world was upon her.  She was in the
+arena of the savage claws, flung there by the man who of all others
+should have protected her from them.  And what had she done to deserve
+it?  She listened to the advocate pleading her case; she primed him to
+admit the charges, to say the worst, in contempt of legal prudence, and
+thereby expose her transparent honesty.  The very things awakening a mad
+suspicion proved her innocence.  But was she this utterly simple person?
+Oh, no!  She was the Diana of the pride in her power of fencing with
+evil--by no means of the order of those ninny young women who realize the
+popular conception of the purely innocent.  She had fenced and kept her
+guard.  Of this it was her angry glory to have the knowledge.  But she
+had been compelled to fence.  Such are men in the world of facts, that
+when a woman steps out of her domestic tangle to assert, because it is a
+tangle, her rights to partial independence, they sight her for their
+prey, or at least they complacently suppose her accessible.  Wretched at
+home, a woman ought to bury herself in her wretchedness, else may she be
+assured that not the cleverest, wariest guard will cover her character.
+
+Against the husband her cause was triumphant.  Against herself she
+decided not to plead it, for this reason, that the preceding Court, which
+was the public and only positive one, had entirely and justly exonerated
+her.  But the holding of her hand by the friend half a minute too long
+for friendship, and the over-friendliness of looks, letters, frequency of
+visits, would speak within her.  She had a darting view of her husband's
+estimation of them in his present mood.  She quenched it; they were
+trifles, things that women of the world have to combat.  The revelation
+to a fair-minded young woman of the majority of men being naught other
+than men, and some of the friendliest of men betraying confidence under
+the excuse of temptation, is one of the shocks to simplicity which leave
+her the alternative of misanthropy or philosophy.  Diana had not the
+heart to hate her kind, so she resigned herself to pardon, and to the
+recognition of the state of duel between the sexes-active enough in her
+sphere of society.  The circle hummed with it; many lived for it.  Could
+she pretend to ignore it?  Her personal experience might have instigated
+a less clear and less intrepid nature to take advantage of the
+opportunity for playing the popular innocent, who runs about with
+astonished eyes to find herself in so hunting a world, and wins general
+compassion, if not shelter in unsuspected and unlicenced places.  There
+is perpetually the inducement to act the hypocrite before the hypocrite
+world, unless a woman submits to be the humbly knitting housewife,
+unquestioningly worshipful of her lord; for the world is ever gracious to
+an hypocrisy that pays homage to the mask of virtue by copying it; the
+world is hostile to the face of an innocence not conventionally simpering
+and quite surprised; the world prefers decorum to honesty.  'Let me be
+myself, whatever the martyrdom!' she cried, in that phase of young
+sensation when, to the blooming woman; the putting on of a mask appears
+to wither her and reduce her to the show she parades.  Yet, in common
+with her sisterhood, she owned she had worn a sort of mask; the world
+demands it of them as the price of their station.  That she had never
+worn it consentingly, was the plea for now casting it off altogether,
+showing herself as she was, accepting martyrdom, becoming the first
+martyr of the modern woman's cause--a grand position! and one imaginable
+to an excited mind in the dark, which does not conjure a critical humour,
+as light does, to correct the feverish sublimity.  She was, then, this
+martyr, a woman capable of telling the world she knew it, and of,
+confessing that she had behaved in disdain of its rigider rules,
+according to her own ideas of her immunities.  O brave!
+
+But was she holding the position by flight?  It involved the challenge
+of consequences, not an evasion of them.
+
+She moaned; her mental steam-wheel stopped; fatigue brought sleep.
+
+She had sensationally led her rebellious wits to The Crossways,
+distilling much poison from thoughts on the way; and there, for the
+luxury of a still seeming indecision, she sank into oblivion.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+RECOUNTS THE JOURNEY IN A CHARIOT, WITH A CERTAIN AMOUNT OF DIALOGUE, AND
+A SMALL INCIDENT ON THE ROAD
+
+In the morning the fight was over.  She looked at the signpost of The
+Crossways whilst dressing, and submitted to follow, obediently as a
+puppet, the road recommended by friends, though a voice within, that she
+took for the intimations of her reason, protested that they were wrong,
+that they were judging of her case in the general, and unwisely--
+disastrously for her.
+
+The mistaking of her desires for her reasons was peculiar to her
+situation.
+
+'So I suppose I shall some day see The Crossways again,' she said, to
+conceive a compensation in the abandonment of freedom.  The night's red
+vision of martyrdom was reserved to console her secretly, among the
+unopened lockers in her treasury of thoughts.  It helped to sustain her;
+and she was too conscious of things necessary for her sustainment to
+bring it to the light of day and examine it.  She had a pitiful bit of
+pleasure in the gratification she imparted to Danvers, by informing her
+that the journey of the day was backward to Copsley.
+
+'If I may venture to say so, ma'am, I am very glad,' said her maid.
+
+'You must be prepared for the questions of lawyers, Danvers.'
+
+'Oh, ma'am!  they'll get nothing out of me, and their wigs won't frighten
+me.'
+
+'It is usually their baldness that is most frightening, my poor Danvers.'
+
+'Nor their baldness, ma'am,' said the literal maid; 'I never cared for
+their heads, or them.  I've been in a Case before.'
+
+'Indeed!' exclaimed her mistress; and she had a chill.
+
+Danvers mentioned a notorious Case, adding, 'They got nothing out of me.'
+
+'In my Case you will please to speak the truth,' said Diana, and beheld
+in the looking-glass the primming of her maid's mouth.  The sight shot a
+sting.
+
+'Understand that there is to be no hesitation about telling the truth of
+what you know of me,' said Diana; and the answer was, 'No, ma'am.'
+
+For Danvers could remark to herself that she knew little, and was not a
+person to hesitate.  She was a maid of the world, with the quality of
+faithfulness, by nature, to a good mistress.
+
+Redworth's further difficulties were confined to the hiring of a
+conveyance for the travellers, and hot-water bottles, together with a
+postillion not addicted to drunkenness.  He procured a posting-chariot,
+an ancient and musty, of a late autumnal yellow unrefreshed by paint;
+the only bottles to be had were Dutch Schiedam.  His postillion,
+inspected at Storling, carried the flag of habitual inebriation on his
+nose, and he deemed it adviseable to ride the mare in accompaniment as
+far as Riddlehurst, notwithstanding the postillion's vows upon his honour
+that he was no drinker.  The emphasis, to a gentleman acquainted with his
+countrymen, was not reassuring.  He had hopes of enlisting a trustier
+fellow at Riddlehurst, but he was disappointed; and while debating upon
+what to do, for he shrank from leaving two women to the conduct of that
+inflamed troughsnout, Brisby, despatched to Storling by an afterthought
+of Lady Dunstane's, rushed out of the Riddlehurst inn taproom, and
+relieved him of the charge of the mare.  He was accommodated with a seat
+on a stool in the chariot.  'My triumphal car,' said his captive.  She
+was very amusing about her postillion; Danvers had to beg pardon for
+laughing.  'You are happy,' observed her mistress.  But Redworth laughed
+too, and he could not boast of any happiness beyond the temporary
+satisfaction, nor could she who sprang the laughter boast of that little.
+She said to herself, in the midst of the hilarity, 'Wherever I go now, in
+all weathers, I am perfectly naked!'  And remembering her readings of a
+certain wonderful old quarto book in her father's library, by an
+eccentric old Scottish nobleman, wherein the wearing of garments and
+sleeping in houses is accused as the cause of human degeneracy, she took
+a forced merry stand on her return to the primitive healthful state of
+man and woman, and affected scorn of our modern ways of dressing and
+thinking.  Whence it came that she had some of her wildest seizures of
+iridescent humour.  Danvers attributed the fun to her mistress's gladness
+in not having pursued her bent to quit the country.  Redworth saw deeper,
+and was nevertheless amazed by the airy hawk-poise and pounce-down of her
+wit, as she ranged high and low, now capriciously generalizing, now
+dropping bolt upon things of passage--the postillion jogging from rum to
+gin, the rustics baconly agape, the horse-kneed ostlers.  She touched
+them to the life in similes and phrases; and next she was aloft,
+derisively philosophizing, but with a comic afflatus that dispersed the
+sharpness of her irony in mocking laughter.  The afternoon refreshments
+at the inn of the county market-town, and the English idea of public
+hospitality, as to manner and the substance provided for wayfarers, were
+among the themes she made memorable to him.  She spoke of everything
+tolerantly, just naming it in a simple sentence, that fell with a ring
+and chimed: their host's ready acquiescence in receiving, orders, his
+contemptuous disclaimer of stuff he did not keep, his flat indifference
+to the sheep he sheared, and the phantom half-crown flickering in one eye
+of the anticipatory waiter; the pervading and confounding smell of stale
+beer over all the apartments; the prevalent, notion of bread, butter,
+tea, milk, sugar, as matter for the exercise of a native inventive
+genius--these were reviewed in quips of metaphor.
+
+'Come, we can do better at an inn or two known to me,' said Redworth.
+
+'Surely this is the best that can be done for us, when we strike them
+with the magic wand of a postillion?' said she.
+
+'It depends, as elsewhere, on the individuals entertaining us.'
+
+'Yet you admit that your railways are rapidly "polishing off" the
+individual.'
+
+'They will spread the metropolitan idea of comfort.'
+
+'I fear they will feed us on nothing but that big word.  It booms--
+a curfew bell--for every poor little light that we would read by.'
+
+Seeing their beacon-nosed postillion preparing too mount and failing in
+his jump, Redworth was apprehensive, and questioned the fellow concerning
+potation.
+
+'Lord, sir, they call me half a horse, but I can't 'bids water,' was the
+reply, with the assurance that he had not 'taken a pailful.'
+
+Habit enabled him to gain his seat.
+
+'It seems to us unnecessary to heap on coal when the chimney is afire;
+but he may know the proper course,' Diana said, convulsing Danvers; and
+there was discernibly to Redworth, under the influence of her phrases, a
+likeness of the flaming 'half-horse,' with the animals all smoking in the
+frost, to a railway engine.  'Your wrinkled centaur,' she named the man.
+Of course he had to play second to her, and not unwillingly; but he
+reflected passingly on the instinctive push of her rich and sparkling
+voluble fancy to the initiative, which women do not like in a woman, and
+men prefer to distantly admire.  English women and men feel toward the
+quick-witted of their species as to aliens, having the demerits of
+aliens-wordiness, vanity, obscurity, shallowness, an empty glitter, the
+sin of posturing.  A quick-witted woman exerting her wit is both a
+foreigner and potentially a criminal.  She is incandescent to a breath of
+rumour.  It accounted for her having detractors; a heavy counterpoise to
+her enthusiastic friends.  It might account for her husband's discontent-
+the reduction of him to a state of mere masculine antagonism.  What is
+the husband of a vanward woman?  He feels himself but a diminished man.
+The English husband of a voluble woman relapses into a dreary mute.  Ah,
+for the choice of places!  Redworth would have yielded her the loquent
+lead for the smallest of the privileges due to him who now rejected all,
+except the public scourging of her.  The conviction was in his mind that
+the husband of this woman sought rather to punish than be rid of her.
+But a part of his own emotion went to form the judgement.
+
+Furthermore, Lady Dunstane's allusion to her 'enemies' made him set down
+her growing crops of backbiters to the trick she had of ridiculing things
+English.  If the English do it themselves, it is in a professionally
+robust, a jocose, kindly way, always with a glance at the other things,
+great things, they excel in; and it is done to have the credit of doing
+it.  They are keen to catch an inimical tone; they will find occasion to
+chastise the presumptuous individual, unless it be the leader of a party,
+therefore a power; for they respect a power.  Redworth knew their
+quaintnesses; without overlooking them he winced at the acid of an irony
+that seemed to spring from aversion, and regretted it, for her sake.  He
+had to recollect that she was in a sharp-strung mood, bitterly
+surexcited; moreover he reminded himself of her many and memorable
+phrases of enthusiasm for England--Shakespeareland, as she would
+sometimes perversely term it, to sink the country in the poet.  English
+fortitude, English integrity, the English disposition to do justice to
+dependents, adolescent English ingenuousness, she was always ready to
+laud.  Only her enthusiasm required rousing by circumstances; it was less
+at the brim than her satire.  Hence she made enemies among a placable
+people.
+
+He felt that he could have helped her under happier conditions.  The
+beautiful vision she had been on the night of the Irish Ball swept before
+him, and he looked at her, smiling.
+
+'Why do you smile?' she said.
+
+'I was thinking of Mr. Sullivan Smith.'
+
+'Ah!  my dear compatriot!  And think, too, of Lord Larrian.'
+
+She caught her breath.  Instead of recreation, the names brought on a
+fit of sadness.  It deepened; shy neither smiled nor rattled any more.
+She gazed across the hedgeways at the white meadows and bare-twigged
+copses showing their last leaves in the frost.
+
+'I remember your words: "Observation is the most, enduring of the
+pleasures of life"; and so I have found it,' she said.  There was a
+brightness along her under-eyelids that caused him to look away.
+
+The expected catastrophe occurred on the descent of a cutting in the
+sand, where their cordial postillion at a trot bumped the chariot against
+the sturdy wheels of a waggon, which sent it reclining for support upon a
+beech-tree's huge intertwisted serpent roots, amid strips of brown
+bracken and pendant weeds, while he exhibited one short stump of leg, all
+boot, in air.  No one was hurt.  Diana disengaged herself from the
+shoulder of Danvers, and mildly said:
+
+'That reminds me, I forgot to ask why we came in a chariot.'
+
+Redworth was excited on her behalf, but the broken glass had done no
+damage, nor had Danvers fainted.  The remark was unintelligible to him,
+apart from the comforting it had been designed to give.  He jumped out,
+and held a hand for them to do the same.  'I never foresaw an event more
+positively,' said he.
+
+'And it was nothing but a back view that inspired you all the way,' said
+Diana.
+
+A waggoner held the horses, another assisted Redworth to right the
+chariot.  The postillion had hastily recovered possession of his official
+seat, that he might as soon as possible feel himself again where he was
+most intelligent, and was gay in stupidity, indifferent to what happened
+behind him.  Diana heard him counselling the waggoner as to the common
+sense of meeting small accidents with a cheerful soul.
+
+'Lord!' he cried, 'I been pitched a Somerset in my time, and taken up for
+dead, and that didn't beat me!'
+
+Disasters of the present kind could hardly affect such a veteran.  But he
+was painfully disconcerted by Redworth's determination not to entrust the
+ladies any farther to his guidance.  Danvers had implored for permission
+to walk the mile to the town, and thence take a fly to Copsley.  Her
+mistress rather sided with the postillion; who begged them to spare him
+the disgrace of riding in and delivering a box at the Red Lion.
+
+'What'll they say?  And they know Arthur Dance well there,' he groaned.
+'What!  Arthur!  chariotin' a box!  And me a better man to his work now
+than I been for many a long season, fit for double the journey!  A bit of
+a shake always braces me up.  I could read a newspaper right off, small
+print and all.  Come along, sir, and hand the ladies in.'
+
+Danvers vowed her thanks to Mr. Redworth for refusing.  They walked
+ahead; the postillion communicated his mixture of professional and human
+feelings to the waggoners, and walked his horses in the rear, meditating
+on the weak-heartedness of gentryfolk, and the means for escaping being
+chaffed out of his boots at the Old Red Lion, where he was to eat, drink,
+and sleep that night.  Ladies might be fearsome after a bit of a shake;
+he would not have supposed it of a gentleman.  He jogged himself into an
+arithmetic of the number of nips of liquor he had taken to soothe him on
+the road, in spite of the gentleman.  'For some of 'em are sworn enemies
+of poor men, as yonder one, ne'er a doubt.'
+
+Diana enjoyed her walk beneath the lingering brown-red of the frosty
+November sunset, with the scent of sand-earth strong in the air.
+
+'I had to hire a chariot because there was no two-horse carriage,' said
+Redworth, 'and I wished to reach Copsley as early as possible.'
+
+She replied, smiling, that accidents were fated.  As a certain marriage
+had been!  The comparison forced itself on her reflections.
+
+'But this is quite an adventure,' said she, reanimated by the brisker
+flow of her blood.  'We ought really to be thankful for it, in days when
+nothing happens.'
+
+Redworth accused her of getting that idea from the perusal of romances.
+
+'Yes, our lives require compression, like romances, to be interesting,
+and we object to the process,' she said.  'Real happiness is a state of
+dulness.  When we taste it consciously it becomes mortal--a thing of the
+Seasons.  But I like my walk.  How long these November sunsets burn, and
+what hues they have!  There is a scientific reason, only don't tell it
+me.  Now I understand why you always used to choose your holidays in
+November.'
+
+She thrilled him with her friendly recollection of his customs.
+
+'As to happiness, the looking forward is happiness,' he remarked.
+
+'Oh, the looking back! back!' she cried.
+
+'Forward!  that is life.'
+
+'And backward, death, if you will; and still at is happiness.  Death, and
+our postillion!'
+
+'Ay; I wonder why the fellow hangs to the rear,' said Redworth, turning
+about.
+
+'It's his cunning strategy, poor creature, so that he may be thought to
+have delivered us at the head of the town, for us to make a purchase or
+two, if we go to the inn on foot,' said Diana.  'We 'll let the manoeuvre
+succeed.'
+
+Redworth declared that she had a head for everything, and she was
+flattered to hear him.
+
+So passing from the southern into the western road, they saw the town-
+lights beneath an amber sky burning out sombrely over the woods of
+Copsley, and entered the town, the postillion following.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+BETWEEN EMMA AND DIANA
+
+Diana was in the arms of her friend at a late hour of the evening, and
+Danvers breathed the amiable atmosphere of footmen once more, professing
+herself perished.  This maid of the world, who could endure hardships and
+loss of society for the mistress to whom she was attached, no sooner saw
+herself surrounded by the comforts befitting her station, than she
+indulged in the luxury of a wailful dejectedness, the better to
+appreciate them.  She was unaffectedly astonished to find her outcries
+against the cold and the journeyings to and fro interpreted as a serving-
+woman's muffled comments on her mistress's behaviour.  Lady Dunstane's
+maid Bartlett, and Mrs. Bridges the housekeeper, and Foster the butler,
+contrived to let her know that they could speak an if they would; and
+they expressed their pity of her to assist her to begin the speaking.
+She bowed in acceptance of Fosters offer of a glass of wine after supper,
+but treated him and the other two immediately as though they had been
+interrogating bigwigs.
+
+'They wormed nothing out of me,' she said to her mistress at night,
+undressing her.  'But what a set they are!  They've got such comfortable
+places, they've all their days and hours for talk of the doings of their
+superiors.  They read the vilest of those town papers, and they put their
+two and two together of what is happening in and about.  And not one of
+the footmen thinks of staying, because it 's so dull; and they and the
+maids object--did one ever hear?--to the three uppers retiring, when they
+'ve done dining, to the private room to dessert.'
+
+'That is the custom?' observed her mistress.
+
+'Foster carries the decanter, ma'am, and Mrs. Bridges the biscuits, and
+Bartlett the plate of fruit, and they march out in order.'
+
+'The man at the head of the procession, probably.'
+
+'Oh yes.  And the others, though they have everything except the wine and
+dessert, don't like it.  When I was here last they were new, and hadn't a
+word against it.  Now they say it's invidious!  Lady Dunstane will be
+left without an under-servant at Copsley soon.  I was asked about your
+boxes, ma'am, and the moment I said they were at Dover, that instant all
+three peeped.  They let out a mouse to me.  They do love to talk!'
+
+Her mistress could have added, 'And you too, my good Danvers!'
+trustworthy though she knew the creature to be in the main.
+
+'Now go, and be sure you have bedclothes enough before you drop asleep,'
+she said; and Danvers directed her steps to gossip with Bartlett.
+
+Diana wrapped herself in a dressing-gown Lady Dunstane had sent her, and
+sat by the fire, thinking of the powder of tattle stored in servants'
+halls to explode beneath her: and but for her choice of roads she might
+have been among strangers.  The liking of strangers best is a curious
+exemplification of innocence.
+
+'Yes, I was in a muse,' she said, raising her head to Emma, whom she
+expected and sat armed to meet, unaccountably iron-nerved.  'I was
+questioning whether I could be quite as blameless as I fancy, if I sit
+and shiver to be in England.  You will tell me I have taken the right
+road.  I doubt it.  But the road is taken, and here I am.  But any road
+that leads me to you is homeward, my darling!'  She tried to melt,
+determining to be at least open with her.
+
+'I have not praised you enough for coming,' said Emma, when they had
+embraced again.
+
+'Praise a little your "truest friend of women."  Your letter gave the
+tug.  I might have resisted it.'
+
+'He came straight from heaven!  But, cruel Tony where is your love?'
+
+'It is unequal to yours, dear, I see.  I could have wrestled with
+anything abstract and distant, from being certain.  But here I am.'
+
+'But, my own dear girl, you never could have allowed this infamous charge
+to be undefended?'
+
+'I think so.  I've an odd apathy as to my character; rather like death,
+when one dreams of flying the soul.  What does it matter?  I should have
+left the flies and wasps to worry a corpse.  And then-good-bye gentility!
+I should have worked for my bread.  I had thoughts of America.  I fancy I
+can write; and Americans, one hears, are gentle to women.'
+
+'Ah, Tony!  there's the looking back.  And, of all women, you!'
+
+'Or else, dear-well, perhaps once on foreign soil, in a different air,
+I might--might have looked back, and seen my whole self, not shattered,
+as I feel it now, and come home again compassionate to the poor
+persecuted animal to defend her.  Perhaps that was what I was running
+away for.  I fled on the instinct, often a good thing to trust.'
+
+'I saw you at The Crossways.'
+
+'I remembered I had the dread that you would, though I did not imagine
+you would reach me so swiftly.  My going there was an instinct, too.
+I suppose we are all instinct when we have the world at our heels.
+Forgive me if I generalize without any longer the right to be included in
+the common human sum.  "Pariah" and "taboo" are words we borrow from
+barbarous tribes; they stick to me.'
+
+'My Tony, you look as bright as ever, and you speak despairingly.'
+
+'Call me enigma.  I am that to myself, Emmy.'
+
+'You are not quite yourself to your friend.'
+
+'Since the blow I have been bewildered; I see nothing upright.  It came
+on me suddenly; stunned me.  A bolt out of a clear sky, as they say.  He
+spared me a scene: There had been threats, and yet the sky was clear, or
+seemed.  When we have a man for arbiter, he is our sky.'
+
+Emma pressed her Tony's unresponsive hand, feeling strangely that her
+friend ebbed from her.
+
+'Has he .  .  .  to mislead him?' she said, colouring at the breach in
+the question.
+
+'Proofs?  He has the proofs he supposes.'
+
+'Not to justify suspicion?'
+
+'He broke open my desk and took my letters.'
+
+'Horrible!  But the letters?' Emma shook with a nervous revulsion.
+
+'You might read them.'
+
+'Basest of men!  That is the unpardonable cowardice!', exclaimed Emma.
+
+'The world will read them, dear,' said Diana, and struck herself to ice.
+She broke from the bitter frigidity in fury.  'They are letters--none
+very long--sometimes two short sentences--he wrote at any spare moment.
+On my honour, as a woman, I feel for him most.  The letters--I would bear
+any accusation rather than that exposure.  Letters of a man of his age to
+a young woman he rates too highly!
+
+The world reads them.  Do you hear it saying it could have excused her
+for that fiddle-faddle with a younger--a young lover?  And had I thought
+of a lover!  .  .  .  I had no thought of loving or being loved.  I
+confess I was flattered.  To you, Emma, I will confess .  .  .  .  You
+see the public ridicule!--and half his age, he and I would have appeared
+a romantic couple!  Confess, I said.  Well, dear, the stake is lighted
+for a trial of its effect on me.  It is this: he was never a
+dishonourable friend; but men appear to be capable of friendship with
+women only for as long as we keep out of pulling distance of that line
+where friendship ceases.  They may step on it; we must hold back a
+league.  I have learnt it.  You will judge whether he disrespects me.
+As for him, he is a man; at his worst, not one of the worst; at his best,
+better than very many.  There, now, Emma, you have me stripped and
+burning; there is my full confession.  Except for this--yes, one thing
+further--that I do rage at the ridicule, and could choose, but for you,
+to have given the world cause to revile me, or think me romantic.
+Something or somebody to suffer for would really be agreeable.  It is a
+singular fact, I have not known what this love is, that they talk about.
+And behold me marched into Smithfield!--society's heretic, if you please.
+I must own I think it hard.'
+
+Emma chafed her cold hand softly.
+
+'It is hard; I understand it,' she murmured.  'And is your Sunday visit
+to us in the list of offences?'
+
+'An item.'
+
+'You gave me a happy day.'
+
+'Then it counts for me in heaven.'
+
+'He set spies on you?'
+
+'So we may presume.'
+
+Emma went through a sphere of tenuious reflections in a flash.
+
+'He will rue it.  Perhaps now .  .  .  he may now be regretting his
+wretched frenzy.  And Tony could pardon; she has the power of pardoning
+in her heart.'
+
+'Oh!  certainly, dear.  But tell me why it is you speak to-night rather
+unlike the sedate, philosophical Emma; in a tone-well, tolerably
+sentimental?'
+
+'I am unaware of it,' said Emma, who could have retorted with a like
+reproach.  'I am anxious, I will not say at present for your happiness,
+for your peace; and I have a hope that possibly a timely word from some
+friend--Lukin or another--might induce him to consider.'
+
+'To pardon me, do you mean?' cried Diana, flushing sternly.
+
+'Not pardon.  Suppose a case of faults on both sides.'
+
+'You address a faulty person, my dear.  But do you know that you are
+hinting at a reconcilement?'
+
+'Might it not be?'
+
+'Open your eyes to what it involves.  I trust I can pardon.  Let him go
+his ways, do his darkest, or repent.  But return to the roof of the
+"basest of men," who was guilty of "the unpardonable cowardice"?  You
+expect me to be superhuman.  When I consent to that, I shall be out of my
+woman's skin, which he has branded.  Go back to him!'  She was taken with
+a shudder of head and limbs.  'No; I really have the power of pardoning,
+and I am bound to; for among my debts to him, this present exemption,
+that is like liberty dragging a chain, or, say, an escaped felon wearing
+his manacles, should count.  I am sensible of my obligation.  The price I
+pay for it is an immovable patch-attractive to male idiots, I have heard,
+and a mark of scorn to females.  Between the two the remainder of my days
+will be lively.  "Out, out, damned spot!"  But it will not.  And not on
+the hand--on the forehead!  We'll talk of it no longer.  I have sent a
+note, with an enclosure, to my lawyers.  I sell The Crossways, if I have
+the married woman's right to any scrap of property, for money to scatter
+fees.'
+
+'My purse, dear Tony!' exclaimed Emma.  'My house!  You will stay with
+me?  Why do you shake your head?  With me you are safe.'  She spied at
+the shadows in her friend's face.  'Ever since your marriage, Tony, you
+have been strange in your trick of refusing to stay with me.  And you and
+I made our friendship the pledge of a belief in eternity!  We vowed it.
+Come, I do talk sentimentally, but my heart is in it.  I beg you--all the
+reasons are with me--to make my house your home.  You will.  You know I
+am rather lonely.'
+
+Diana struggled to keep her resolution from being broken by tenderness.
+And doubtless poor Sir Lukin had learnt his lesson; still, her defensive
+instincts could never quite slumber under his roof; not because of any
+further fear that they would have to be summoned; it was chiefly owing to
+the consequences of his treacherous foolishness.  For this half-home with
+her friend thenceforward denied to her, she had accepted a protector,
+called husband--rashly, past credence, in the retrospect; but it had been
+her propelling motive; and the loathings roused by her marriage helped to
+sicken her at the idea of a lengthened stay where she had suffered the
+shock precipitating her to an act of insanity.
+
+'I do not forget you were an heiress, Emmy, and I will come to you if I
+need money to keep my head up.  As for staying, two reasons are against
+it.  If I am to fight my battle, I must be seen; I must go about--
+wherever I am received.  So my field is London.  That is obvious.
+And I shall rest better in a house where my story is not known.'
+
+Two or three questions ensued.  Diana had to fortify her fictitious
+objection by alluding to her maid's prattle of the household below;
+and she excused the hapless, overfed, idle people of those regions.
+
+To Emma it seemed a not unnatural sensitiveness.  She came to a settled
+resolve in her thoughts, as she said, 'They want a change.  London is
+their element.'
+
+Feeling that she deceived this true heart, however lightly and
+necessarily, Diana warmed to her, forgiving her at last for having netted
+and dragged her back to front the enemy; an imposition of horrors, of
+which the scene and the travelling with Redworth, the talking of her case
+with her most intimate friend as well, had been a distempering foretaste.
+
+They stood up and kissed, parting for the night.
+
+An odd world, where for the sin we have not participated in we must fib
+and continue fibbing, she reflected.  She did not entirely cheat her
+clearer mind, for she perceived that her step in flight had been urged
+both by a weak despondency and a blind desperation; also that the world
+of a fluid civilization is perforce artificial.  But her mind was in the
+background of her fevered senses, and when she looked in the glass and
+mused on uttering the word, 'Liar!' to the lovely image, her senses were
+refreshed, her mind somewhat relieved, the face appeared so sovereignly
+defiant of abasement.
+
+Thus did a nature distraught by pain obtain some short lull of repose.
+Thus, moreover, by closely reading herself, whom she scourged to excess
+that she might in justice be comforted, she gathered an increasing
+knowledge of our human constitution, and stored matter for the brain.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+TOUCHING THE FIRST DAYS OF HER PROBATION
+
+The result of her sleeping was, that Diana's humour, locked up overnight,
+insisted on an excursion, as she lay with half-buried head and open
+eyelids, thinking of the firm of lawyers she had to see; and to whom,
+and to the legal profession generally, she would be, under outward
+courtesies, nothing other than 'the woman Warwick.'  She pursued the
+woman Warwick unmercifully through a series of interviews with her
+decorous and crudely-minded defenders; accurately perusing them behind
+their senior staidness.  Her scorching sensitiveness sharpened her
+intelligence in regard to the estimate of discarded wives entertained by
+men of business and plain men of the world, and she drove the woman
+Warwick down their ranks, amazed by the vision of a puppet so unlike to
+herself in reality, though identical in situation.  That woman, reciting
+her side of the case, gained a gradual resemblance to Danvers; she spoke
+primly; perpetually the creature aired her handkerchief; she was bent on
+softening those sugarloaves, the hard business-men applying to her for
+facts.  Facts were treated as unworthy of her; mere stuff of the
+dustheap, mutton-bones, old shoes; she swam above them in a cocoon of her
+spinning, sylphidine, unseizable; and between perplexing and mollifying
+the slaves of facts, she saw them at their heels, a tearful fry, abjectly
+imitative of her melodramatic performances.  The spectacle was presented
+of a band of legal gentlemen vociferating mightily for swords and the
+onset, like the Austrian empress's Magyars, to vindicate her just and
+holy cause.  Our Law-courts failing, they threatened Parliament, and for
+a last resort, the country!  We are not going to be the woman Warwick
+without a stir, my brethren.
+
+Emma, an early riser that morning, for the purpose of a private
+consultation with Mr. Redworth, found her lying placidly wakeful, to
+judge by appearances.
+
+'You have not slept, my dear child?'
+
+'Perfectly,' said Diana, giving her hand and offering the lips.  'I'm
+only having a warm morning bath in bed,' she added, in explanation of a
+chill moisture that the touch of her exposed skin betrayed; for whatever
+the fun of the woman Warwick, there had been sympathetic feminine horrors
+in the frame of the sentient woman.
+
+Emma fancied she kissed a quiet sufferer.  A few remarks very soon set
+her wildly laughing.  Both were laughing when Danvers entered the room,
+rather guilty, being late; and the sight of the prim-visaged maid she had
+been driving among the lawyers kindled Diana's comic imagination to such
+a pitch that she ran riot in drolleries, carrying her friend headlong on
+the tide.
+
+'I have not laughed so much since you were married,' said Emma.
+
+'Nor I, dear; proving that the bar to it was the ceremony,' said Diana.
+
+She promised to remain at Copsley three days.  'Then for the campaign in
+Mr. Redworth's metropolis.  I wonder whether I may ask him to get me
+lodgings: a sitting-room and two bedrooms.  The Crossways has a board up
+for letting.  I should prefer to be my own tenant; only it would give me
+a hundred pounds more to get a substitute's money.  I should like to be
+at work writing instantly.  Ink is my opium, and the pen my nigger, and
+he must dig up gold for me.  It is written.  Danvers, you can make ready
+to dress me when I ring.'
+
+Emma helped the beautiful woman to her dressing-gown and the step from
+her bed.  She had her thoughts, and went down to Redworth at the
+breakfast-table, marvelling that any husband other than a madman could
+cast such a jewel away.  The material loveliness eclipses intellectual
+qualities in such reflections.
+
+'He must be mad,' she said, compelled to disburden herself in a congenial
+atmosphere; which, however, she infrigidated by her overflow of
+exclamatory wonderment--a curtain that shook voluminous folds, luring
+Redworth to dreams of the treasure forfeited.  He became rigidly
+practical.
+
+'Provision will have to be made for her.  Lukin must see Mr. Warwick.
+She will do wisely to stay with friends in town, mix in company.  Women
+are the best allies for such cases.  Who are her solicitors?'
+
+'They are mine: Braddock, Thorpe, and Simnel.'
+
+'A good firm.  She is in safe hands with them.  I dare say they may come
+to an arrangement.'
+
+'I should wish it.  She will never consent.'
+
+Redworth shrugged.  A woman's 'never' fell far short of outstripping the
+sturdy pedestrian Time, to his mind.
+
+Diana saw him drive off to catch the coach in the valley, regulated to
+meet the train, and much though she liked him, she was not sorry that he
+had gone.  She felt the better clad for it.  She would have rejoiced to
+witness the departure on wings of all her friends, except Emma, to whom
+her coldness overnight had bound her anew warmly in contrition.  And yet
+her friends were well-beloved by her; but her emotions were distraught.
+
+Emma told her that Mr. Redworth had undertaken to hire a suite of
+convenient rooms, and to these she looked forward, the nest among
+strangers, where she could begin to write, earning bread: an idea that,
+with the pride of independence, conjured the pleasant morning smell of a
+bakery about her.
+
+She passed three peaceable days at Copsley, at war only with the luxury
+of the house.  On the fourth, a letter to Lady Dunstane from Redworth
+gave the address of the best lodgings he could find, and Diana started
+for London.
+
+She had during a couple of weeks, besides the first fresh exercising of
+her pen, as well as the severe gratification of economy, a savage
+exultation in passing through the streets on foot and unknown.  Save for
+the plunges into the office of her solicitors, she could seem to herself
+a woman who had never submitted to the yoke.  What a pleasure it was,
+after finishing a number of pages, to start Eastward toward the lawyer-
+regions, full of imaginary cropping incidents, and from that churchyard
+Westward, against smoky sunsets, or in welcome fogs, an atom of the
+crowd!  She had an affection for the crowd.  They clothed her.  She
+laughed at the gloomy forebodings of Danvers concerning the perils
+environing ladies in the streets after dark alone.  The lights in the
+streets after dark and the quick running of her blood, combined to strike
+sparks of fancy and inspirit the task of composition at night.  This new,
+strange, solitary life, cut off from her adulatory society, both by the
+shock that made the abyss and by the utter foreignness, threw her in upon
+her natural forces, recasting her, and thinning away her memory of her
+past days, excepting girlhood, into the remote.  She lived with her
+girlhood as with a simple little sister.  They were two in one, and she
+corrected the dreams of the younger, protected and counselled her very
+sagely, advising her to love Truth and look always to Reality for her
+refreshment.  She was ready to say, that no habitable spot on our planet
+was healthier and pleasanter than London.  As to the perils haunting the
+head of Danvers, her experiences assured her of a perfect immunity from
+them; and the maligned thoroughfares of a great city, she was ready to
+affirm, contrasted favourably with certain hospitable halls.
+
+The long-suffering Fates permitted her for a term to enjoy the generous
+delusion.  Subsequently a sweet surprise alleviated the shock she had
+sustained.  Emma Dunstane's carriage was at her door, and Emma entered
+her sitting-room, to tell her of having hired a house in the
+neighbourhood, looking on the park.  She begged to have her for guest,
+sorrowfully anticipating the refusal.  At least they were to be near one
+another.
+
+'You really like this life in lodgings?' asked Emma, to whom the stiff
+furniture and narrow apartments were a dreariness, the miserably small
+fire of the sitting-room an aspect of cheerless winter.
+
+'I do,' said Diana; 'yes,' she added with some reserve, and smiled at her
+damped enthusiasm, 'I can eat when I like, walk, work--and I am working!
+My legs and my pen demand it.  Let me be independent!  Besides, I begin
+to learn something of the bigger world outside the one I know, and I
+crush my mincing tastes.  In return for that, I get a sense of strength
+I had not when I was a drawing-room exotic.  Much is repulsive.  But I am
+taken with a passion for reality.'
+
+They spoke of the lawyers, and the calculated period of the trial; of the
+husband too, in his inciting belief in the falseness of his wife.  'That
+is his excuse,' Diana said, her closed mouth meditatively dimpling the
+comers over thoughts of his grounds for fury.  He had them, though none
+for the incriminating charge.  The Sphinx mouth of the married woman at
+war and at bay must be left unriddled.  She and the law differed in their
+interpretation of the dues of wedlock.
+
+But matters referring to her case were secondary with Diana beside the
+importance of her storing impressions.  Her mind required to hunger for
+something, and this Reality which frequently she was forced to loathe,
+she forced herself proudly to accept, despite her youthfulness.  Her
+philosophy swallowed it in the lump, as the great serpent his meal; she
+hoped to digest it sleeping likewise.  Her visits of curiosity to the Law
+Courts, where she stood spying and listening behind a veil, gave her a
+great deal of tough substance to digest.  There she watched the process
+of the tortures to be applied to herself, and hardened her senses for the
+ordeal.  She saw there the ribbed and shanked old skeleton world on which
+our fair fleshly is moulded.  After all, your Fool's Paradise is not a
+garden to grow in.  Charon's ferry-boat is not thicker with phantoms.
+They do not live in mind or soul.  Chiefly women people it: a certain
+class of limp men; women for the most part: they are sown there.  And put
+their garden under the magnifying glass of intimacy, what do we behold?
+A world not better than the world it curtains, only foolisher.
+
+Her conversations with Lady Dunstane brought her at last to the point of
+her damped enthusiasm.  She related an incident or two occurring in her
+career of independence, and they discussed our state of civilization
+plainly and gravely, save for the laughing peals her phrases occasionally
+provoked; as when she named the intruders and disturbers of solitarily-
+faring ladies, 'Cupid's footpads.'  Her humour was created to swim on
+waters where a prescribed and cultivated prudery should pretend to be
+drowning.
+
+'I was getting an exalted idea of English gentlemen, Emmy.  "Rich and
+rare were the gems she wore."  I was ready to vow that one might traverse
+the larger island similarly respected.  I praised their chivalry.
+I thought it a privilege to live in such a land.  I cannot describe to
+you how delightful it was to me to walk out and home generally protected.
+I might have been seriously annoyed but that one of the clerks-
+"articled," he called himself--of our lawyers happened to be by.
+He offered to guard me, and was amusing with his modest tiptoe air.
+No, I trust to the English common man more than ever.  He is a man of
+honour.  I am convinced he is matchless in any other country, except
+Ireland.  The English gentleman trades on his reputation.'
+
+He was condemned by an afflicted delicacy, the sharpest of critical
+tribunals.
+
+Emma bade her not to be too sweeping from a bad example.
+
+'It is not a single one,' said Diana.  'What vexes me and frets me is,
+that I must be a prisoner, or allow Danvers to mount guard.  And I can't
+see the end of it.  And Danvers is no magician.  She seems to know her
+countrymen, though.  She warded one of them off, by saying to me: "This
+is the crossing, my lady."  He fled.'
+
+Lady Dunstane affixed the popular title to the latter kind of gentleman.
+She was irritated on her friend's behalf, and against the worrying of her
+sisterhood, thinking in her heart, nevertheless, that the passing of a
+face and figure like Diana's might inspire honourable emotions, pitiable
+for being hapless.
+
+'If you were with me, dear, you would have none of these annoyances,' she
+said, pleading forlornly.
+
+Diana smiled to herself.  'No!  I should relapse into softness.  This
+life exactly suits my present temper.  My landlady is respectful and
+attentive; the little housemaid is a willing slave; Danvers does not
+despise them pugnaciously; they make a home for me, and I am learning
+daily.  Do you know, the less ignorant I become, the more considerate I
+am for the ignorance of others--I love them for it.'  She squeezed Emma's
+hand with more meaning than her friend apprehended.  'So I win my
+advantage from the trifles I have to endure.  They are really trifles,
+and I should once have thought them mountains!'
+
+For the moment Diana stipulated that she might not have to encounter
+friends or others at Lady Dunstane's dinner-table, and the season not
+being favourable to those gatherings planned by Lady Dunstane in her
+project of winning supporters, there was a respite, during which Sir
+Lukin worked manfully at his three Clubs to vindicate Diana's name from
+the hummers and hawers, gaining half a dozen hot adherents, and a body of
+lukewarm, sufficiently stirred to be desirous to see the lady.  He worked
+with true champion zeal, although an interview granted him by the husband
+settled his opinion as to any possibility of the two ever coming to
+terms.  Also it struck him that if he by misadventure had been a woman
+and the wife of such a fellow, by Jove!  .  .  .his apostrophe to the
+father of the gods of pagandom signifying the amount of matter Warwick
+would have had reason to complain of in earnest.  By ricochet his
+military mind rebounded from his knowledge of himself to an ardent, faith
+in Mrs. Warwick's innocence; for, as there was no resemblance between
+them, there must, he deduced, be a difference in their capacity for
+enduring the perpetual company of a prig, a stick, a petrified poser.
+Moreover, the novel act of advocacy, and the nature of the advocacy, had
+effect on him.  And then he recalled the scene in the winter beech-woods,
+and Diana's wild-deer eyes; her, perfect generosity to a traitor and
+fool.  How could he have doubted her?  Glimpses of the corrupting cause
+for it partly penetrated his density: a conqueror of ladies, in mid-
+career, doubts them all.  Of course he had meant no harm, nothing worse
+than some petty philandering with the loveliest woman of her time.  And,
+by Jove! it was worth the rebuff to behold the Beauty in her wrath.
+
+The reflections of Lothario, however much tending tardily to do justice
+to a particular lady, cannot terminate wholesomely.  But he became a
+gallant partisan.  His portrayal of Mr. Warwick to his wife and his
+friends was fine caricature.  'The fellow had his hand up at my first
+word--stood like a sentinel under inspection.  "Understand, Sir Lukin,
+that I receive you simply as an acquaintance.  As an intermediary,
+permit me to state that you are taking superfluous trouble.  The case
+must proceed.  It is final.  She is at liberty, in the meantime, to draw
+on my bankers for the provision she may need, at the rate of five hundred
+pounds per annum."  He spoke of "the lady now bearing my name."  He was
+within an inch of saying "dishonouring."  I swear I heard the "dis,"
+and he caught himself up.  He "again declined any attempt towards
+reconciliation."  It could "only be founded on evasion of the truth to
+be made patent on the day of trial."  Half his talk was lawyers' lingo.
+The fellow's teeth looked like frost.  If Lot's wife had a brother, his
+name's Warwick.  How Diana Merion, who could have had the pick of the
+best of us, ever came to marry a fellow like that, passes my
+comprehension, queer creatures as women are!  He can ride; that's about
+all he can do.  I told him Mrs. Warwick had no thought of reconciliation.
+"Then, Sir Lukin, you will perceive that we have no standpoint for a
+discussion."  I told him the point was, for a man of honour not to drag
+his wife before the public, as he had no case to stand on--less than
+nothing.  You should have seen the fellow's face.  He shot a sneer up to
+his eyelids, and flung his head back.  So I said, "Good-day."  He marches
+me to the door, "with his compliments to Lady Dunstane."  I could have
+floored him for that.  Bless my soul, what fellows the world is made of,
+when here's a man, calling himself a gentleman, who, just because he
+gets in a rage with his wife for one thing or another--and past all
+competition the handsomest woman of her day, and the cleverest, the
+nicest, the best of the whole boiling--has her out for a public
+horsewhipping, and sets all the idiots of the kingdom against her!
+I tried to reason with him.  He made as if he were going to sleep
+standing.'
+
+Sir Lukin gratified Lady Dunstane by his honest championship of Diana.
+And now, in his altered mood (the thrice indebted rogue was just cloudily
+conscious of a desire to propitiate his dear wife by serving her friend),
+he began a crusade against the scandal-newspapers, going with an Irish
+military comrade straight to the editorial offices, and leaving his card
+and a warning that the chastisement for print of the name of the lady in
+their columns would be personal and condign.  Captain Carew Mahony,
+albeit unacquainted with Mrs. Warwick, had espoused her cause.  She was
+a woman, she was an Irishwoman, she was a beautiful woman.  She had,
+therefore, three positive claims on him as a soldier and a man.  Other
+Irish gentlemen, animated by the same swelling degrees, were awaking to
+the intimation that they might be wanted.  Some words were dropped here
+and there by General Lord Larrian: he regretted his age and infirmities.
+A goodly regiment for a bodyguard might have been selected to protect her
+steps in the public streets; when it was bruited that the General had
+sent her a present of his great Newfoundland dog, Leander, to attend on
+her and impose a required respect.  But as it chanced that her address
+was unknown to the volunteer constabulary, they had to assuage their
+ardour by thinking the dog luckier than they.
+
+The report of the dog was a fact.  He arrived one morning at Diana's
+lodgings, with a soldier to lead him, and a card to introduce:--the
+Hercules of dogs, a very ideal of the species, toweringly big,
+benevolent, reputed a rescuer of lives, disdainful of dog-fighting,
+devoted to his guardian's office, with a majestic paw to give and the
+noblest satisfaction in receiving caresses ever expressed by mortal male
+enfolded about the head, kissed, patted, hugged, snuggled, informed that
+he was his new mistress's one love and darling.
+
+She despatched a thrilling note of thanks to Lord Larrian, sure of her
+touch upon an Irish heart.
+
+The dog Leander soon responded to the attachment of a mistress enamoured
+of him.  'He is my husband,' she said to Emma, and started a tear in the
+eyes of her smiling friend; 'he promises to trust me, and never to have
+the law of me, and to love my friends as his own; so we are certain to
+agree.'  In rain, snow, sunshine, through the parks and the streets, he
+was the shadow of Diana, commanding, on the whole, apart from some
+desperate attempts to make him serve as introducer, a civilized behaviour
+in the legions of Cupid's footpads.  But he helped, innocently enough, to
+create an enemy.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+GIVING GLIMPSES OF DIANA UNDER HER CLOUD BEFORE THE WORLD AND OF HER
+FURTHER APPRENTICESHIP
+
+As the day of her trial became more closely calculable, Diana's
+anticipated alarms receded with the deadening of her heart to meet the
+shock.  She fancied she had put on proof-armour, unconscious that it was
+the turning of the inward flutterer to steel, which supplied her cuirass
+and shield.  The necessity to brave society, in the character of honest
+Defendant, caused but a momentary twitch of the nerves.  Her heart beat
+regularly, like a serviceable clock; none of her faculties abandoned her
+save songfulness, and none belied her, excepting a disposition to
+tartness almost venomous in the sarcastic shafts she let fly at friends
+interceding with Mr. Warwick to spare his wife, when she had determined
+to be tried.  A strange fit of childishness overcame her powers of
+thinking, and was betrayed in her manner of speaking, though--to herself
+her dwindled humour allowed her to appear the towering Britomart.  She
+pouted contemptuously on hearing that a Mr. Sullivan Smith (a remotely
+recollected figure) had besought Mr. Warwick for an interview, and gained
+it, by stratagem, 'to bring the man to his senses': but an ultra-Irishman
+did not compromise her battle-front, as the busybody supplications of a
+personal friend like Mr. Redworth did; and that the latter, without
+consulting her, should be 'one of the plaintive crew whining about the
+heels of the Plaintiff for a mercy she disdained and rejected' was bitter
+to her taste.
+
+'He does not see that unless I go through the fire there is no
+justification for this wretched character of mine!' she exclaimed.
+Truce, treaty, withdrawal, signified publicly pardon, not exoneration by
+any means; and now that she was in armour she had no dread of the public.
+So she said.  Redworth's being then engaged upon the canvass of a
+borough, added to the absurdity of his meddling with the dilemmas of a
+woman.  'Dear me, Emma! think of stepping aside from the parliamentary
+road to entreat a husband to relent, and arrange the domestic alliance of
+a contrary couple!  Quixottry is agreeable reading, a silly performance.'
+Lady Dunstane pleaded his friendship.  She had to quit the field where
+such darts were showering.
+
+The first dinner-party was aristocratic, easy to encounter.  Lord and
+Lady Crane, Lady Pennon, Lord and Lady Esquart, Lord Larrian, Mr. and
+Mrs. Montvert of Halford Manor, Lady Singleby, Sir Walter Capperston
+friends, admirers of Diana; patrons, in the phrase of the time, of her
+father, were the guests.  Lady Pennon expected to be amused, and was
+gratified, for Diana had only to open her mouth to set the great lady
+laughing.  She petitioned to have Mrs. Warwick at her table that day
+week, because the marquis was dying to make her acquaintance, and begged
+to have all her sayings repeated to him; vowed she must be salt in the
+desert.  'And remember, I back you through thick and thin,' said Lady
+Pennon.  To which Diana replied: 'If I am salt in the desert, you are the
+spring'; and the old lady protested she must put that down for her book.
+The witty Mrs. Warwick, of whom wit was expected, had many incitements to
+be guilty of cheap wit; and the beautiful Mrs. Warwick, being able to
+pass anything she uttered, gave good and bad alike, under the impulsion
+to give out something, that the stripped and shivering Mrs. Warwick might
+find a cover in applause.  She discovered the social uses of cheap wit;
+she laid ambushes for anecdotes, a telling form of it among a people of
+no conversational interlocution, especially in the circles depending for
+dialogue upon perpetual fresh supplies of scandal; which have plentiful
+crops, yet not sufficient.  The old dinner and supper tables at The
+Crossways furnished her with an abundant store; and recollection failing,
+she invented.  Irish anecdotes are always popular in England, as
+promoting, besides the wholesome shake of the sides, a kindly sense of
+superiority.  Anecdotes also are portable, unlike the lightning flash,
+which will not go into the pocket; they can be carried home, they are
+disbursable at other tables.  These were Diana's weapons.  She was
+perforce the actress of her part.
+
+In happier times, when light of heart and natural, her vogue had not been
+so enrapturing.  Doubtless Cleopatra in her simple Egyptian uniform would
+hardly have won such plaudits as her stress of barbaric Oriental
+splendours evoked for her on the swan and serpent Nile-barge--not from
+posterity at least.  It is a terrible decree, that all must act who would
+prevail; and the more extended the audience, the greater need for the
+mask and buskin.
+
+From Lady Pennon's table Diana passed to Lady Crane's, Lady Esquart's,
+Lady Singleby's, the Duchess of Raby's, warmly clad in the admiration she
+excited.  She appeared at Princess Therese Paryli's first ball of the
+season, and had her circle, not of worshippers only.  She did not dance.
+The princess, a fair Austrian, benevolent to her sisterhood, an admirer
+of Diana's contrasting complexion, would have had her dance once in a
+quadrille of her forming, but yielded to the mute expression of the
+refusal.  Wherever Mrs. Warwick went, her arts of charming were addressed
+to the women.  Men may be counted on for falling bowled over by a
+handsome face and pointed tongue; women require some wooing from their
+ensphered and charioted sister, particularly if she is clouded; and old
+women--excellent buttresses--must be suavely courted.  Now, to woo the
+swimming matron and court the settled dowager, she had to win forgiveness
+for her beauty; and this was done, easily done, by forbearing to angle
+with it in the press of nibblers.  They ranged about her, individually
+unnoticed.  Seeming unaware of its effect where it kindled, she smote a
+number of musical female chords, compassion among them.  A general grave
+affability of her eyes and smiles was taken for quiet pleasure in the
+scene.  Her fitful intentness of look when conversing with the older
+ladies told of the mind within at work upon what they said, and she was
+careful that plain dialogue should make her comprehensible to them.
+Nature taught her these arts, through which her wit became extolled
+entirely on the strength of her reputation, and her beauty did her
+service by never taking aim abroad.  They are the woman's arts of self-
+defence, as legitimately and honourably hers as the manful use of the
+fists with a coarser sex.  If it had not been nature that taught her the
+practice of them in extremity, the sagacious dowagers would have seen
+brazenness rather than innocence--or an excuseable indiscretion--in the
+part she was performing.  They are not lightly duped by one of their sex.
+Few tasks are more difficult than for a young woman under a cloud to
+hoodwink old women of the world.  They are the prey of financiers, but
+Time has presented them a magic ancient glass to scan their sex in.
+
+At Princess Paryli's Ball two young men of singular elegance were
+observed by Diana, little though she concentered her attention on any
+figures of the groups.  She had the woman's faculty (transiently bestowed
+by perfervid jealousy upon men) of distinguishing minutely in the calmest
+of indifferent glances.  She could see without looking; and when her eyes
+were wide they had not to dwell to be detective.  It did not escape her
+that the Englishman of the two hurried for the chance of an introduction,
+nor that he suddenly, after putting a question to a man beside him,
+retired.  She spoke of them to Emma as they drove home.  'The princess's
+partner in the first quadrille .  .  .  Hungarian, I suppose?  He was
+like a Tartar modelled by a Greek: supple as the Scythian's bow, braced
+as the string!  He has the air of a born horseman, and valses perfectly.
+I won't say he was handsomer than a young Englishman there, but he had
+the advantage of soldierly training.  How different is that quick springy
+figure from our young men's lounging style!  It comes of military
+exercise and discipline.'
+
+'That was Count Jochany, a cousin of the princess, and a cavalry
+officer,' said Emma.  'You don't know the other?  I am sure the one you
+mean must be Percy Dacier.'
+
+His retiring was explained: the Hon. Percy Dacier was the nephew of Lord
+Dannisburgh, often extolled to her as the promising youngster of his day,
+with the reserve that he wasted his youth: for the young gentleman was
+decorous and studious; ambitious, according to report; a politician
+taking to politics much too seriously and exclusively to suit his uncle's
+pattern for the early period of life.  Uncle and nephew went their
+separate ways, rarely meeting, though their exchange of esteem was
+cordial.
+
+Thinking over his abrupt retirement from the crowded semicircle, Diana
+felt her position pinch her, she knew not why.
+
+Lady Dunstane was as indefatigable by day as by night in the business of
+acting goddess to her beloved Tony, whom she assured that the service,
+instead of exhausting, gave her such healthfulness as she had imagined
+herself to have lost for ever.  The word was passed, and invitations
+poured in to choice conversational breakfasts, private afternoon
+concerts, all the humming season's assemblies.  Mr. Warwick's treatment
+of his wife was taken by implication for lunatic; wherever she was heard
+or seen, he had no case; a jury of some hundreds of both sexes, ready to
+be sworn, pronounced against him.  Only the personal enemies of the lord
+in the suit presumed to doubt, and they exercised the discretion of a
+minority.
+
+But there is an upper middle class below the aristocratic, boasting an
+aristocracy of morals, and eminently persuasive of public opinion, if not
+commanding it.  Previous to the relaxation, by amendment, of a certain
+legal process, this class was held to represent the austerity of the
+country.  At present a relaxed austerity is represented; and still the
+bulk of the members are of fair repute, though not quite on the level of
+their pretensions.  They were then, while more sharply divided from the
+titular superiors they are socially absorbing, very powerful to brand a
+woman's character, whatever her rank might be; having innumerable
+agencies and avenues for that high purpose, to say nothing of the
+printing-press.  Lady Dunstane's anxiety to draw them over to the cause
+of her friend set her thinking of the influential Mrs. Cramborne Wathin,
+with whom she was distantly connected; the wife of a potent serjeant-at-
+law fast mounting to the Bench and knighthood; the centre of a circle,
+and not strangely that, despite her deficiency in the arts and graces,
+for she had wealth and a cook, a husband proud of his wine-cellar, and
+the ambition to rule; all the rewards, together with the expectations, of
+the virtuous.  She was a lady of incisive features bound in stale
+parchment.  Complexion she had none, but she had spotlessness of skin,
+and sons and daughters just resembling her, like cheaper editions of a
+precious quarto of a perished type.  You discerned the imitation of the
+type, you acknowledged the inferior compositor.  Mr. Cramborne Wathin was
+by birth of a grade beneath his wife; he sprang (behind a curtain of
+horror) from tradesmen.  The Bench was in designation for him to wash out
+the stain, but his children suffered in large hands and feet, short legs,
+excess of bone, prominences misplaced.  Their mother inspired them
+carefully with the religion she opposed to the pretensions of a nobler
+blood, while instilling into them that the blood they drew from her was
+territorial, far above the vulgar.  Her appearance and her principles
+fitted her to stand for the Puritan rich of the period, emerging by the
+aid of an extending wealth into luxurious worldliness, and retaining the
+maxims of their forefathers for the discipline of the poor and erring.
+
+Lady Dunstane called on her, ostensibly to let her know she had taken a
+house in town for the season, and in the course of the chat Mrs.
+Cramborne Wathin was invited to dinner.  'You will meet my dear friend,
+Mrs. Warwick,' she said, and the reply was: 'Oh, I have heard of her.'
+
+The formal consultation with Mr. Cramborne Wathin ended in an agreement
+to accept Lady Dunstane's kind invitation.
+
+Considering her husband's plenitude of old legal anecdotes, and her own
+diligent perusal of the funny publications of the day, that she might be
+on the level of the wits and celebrities she entertained, Mrs. Cramborne
+Wathin had a right to expect the leading share in the conversation to
+which she was accustomed.  Every honour was paid to them; they met
+aristocracy in the persons of Lord Larrian, of Lady Rockden, Colonel
+Purlby, the Pettigrews, but neither of them held the table for a moment;
+the topics flew, and were no sooner up than down; they were unable to get
+a shot.  They had to eat in silence, occasionally grinning, because a
+woman labouring under a stigma would rattle-rattle, as if the laughter of
+the company were her due, and decency beneath her notice.  Some one
+alluded to a dog of Mrs. Warwick's, whereupon she trips out a story of
+her dog's amazing intelligence.
+
+'And pray,' said Mrs. Cramborne Wathin across the table, merely to slip
+in a word, 'what is the name of this wonderful dog?'
+
+'His name is Leander,' said Diana.
+
+'Oh, Leander.  I don't think I hear myself calling to a dog in a name of
+three syllables.  Two at the most.'
+
+No, so I call Hero!  if I want him to come immediately,' said Diana, and
+the gentlemen, to Mrs. Cramborne Wathin's astonishment, acclaimed it.
+Mr. Redworth, at her elbow, explained the point, to her disgust.  .  .
+
+That was Diana's offence.
+
+If it should seem a small one, let it be remembered that a snub was
+intended, and was foiled; and foiled with an apparent simplicity, enough
+to exasperate, had there been no laughter of men to back the countering
+stroke.  A woman under a cloud, she talked, pushed to shine; she would be
+heard, would be applauded.  Her chronicler must likewise admit the error
+of her giving way to a petty sentiment of antagonism on first beholding
+Mrs. Cramborne Wathin, before whom she at once resolved to be herself,
+for a holiday, instead of acting demurely to conciliate.  Probably it was
+an antagonism of race, the shrinking of the skin from the burr.  But when
+Tremendous Powers are invoked, we should treat any simple revulsion of
+our blood as a vice.  The Gods of this world's contests demand it of us,
+in relation to them, that the mind, and not the instincts, shall be at
+work.  Otherwise the course of a prudent policy is never to invoke them,
+but avoid.
+
+The upper class was gained by her intrepidity, her charm, and her
+elsewhere offending wit, however the case might go.  It is chivalrous,
+but not, alas, inflammable in support of innocence.  The class below it
+is governed in estimates of character by accepted patterns of conduct;
+yet where innocence under persecution is believed to exist, the members
+animated by that belief can be enthusiastic.  Enthusiasm is a heaven-sent
+steeplechaser, and takes a flying leap of the ordinary barriers; it is
+more intrusive than chivalry, and has a passion to communicate its
+ardour.  Two letters from stranger ladies reached Diana, through her
+lawyers and Lady Dunstane.  Anonymous letters, not so welcome, being male
+effusions, arrived at her lodgings, one of them comical almost over the
+verge to pathos in its termination: 'To me you will ever be the Goddess
+Diana--my faith in woman!'
+
+He was unacquainted with her!
+
+She had not the heart to think the writers donkeys.  How they obtained
+her address was a puzzle; they stole in to comfort her slightly.  They
+attached her to her position of Defendant by the thought of what would
+have been the idea of her character if she had flown--a reflection
+emanating from inexperience of the resources of sentimentalists.
+
+If she had flown!  She was borne along by the tide like a butterfly that
+a fish may gobble unless a friendly hand shall intervene.  And could it
+in nature?  She was past expectation of release.  The attempt to imagine
+living with any warmth of blood in her vindicated character, for the sake
+of zealous friends, consigned her to a cold and empty house upon a
+foreign earth.  She had to set her mind upon the mysterious enshrouded
+Twelve, with whom the verdict would soon be hanging, that she might
+prompt her human combativeness to desire the vindication at such a price
+as she would have to pay for it.  When Emma Dunstane spoke to her of the
+certainty of triumphing, she suggested a possible dissentient among the
+fateful Twelve, merely to escape the drumming sound of that hollow big
+word.  The irreverent imp of her humour came to her relief by calling
+forth the Twelve, in the tone of the clerk of the Court, and they
+answered to their names of trades and crafts after the manner of
+Titania's elves, and were questioned as to their fitness, by education,
+habits, enlightenment, to pronounce decisively upon the case in dispute,
+the case being plainly stated.  They replied, that the long habit of
+dealing with scales enabled them to weigh the value of evidence the most
+delicate.  Moreover, they were Englishmen, and anything short of
+downright bullet facts went to favour the woman.  For thus we light the
+balance of legal injustice toward the sex: we conveniently wink, ma'am.
+A rough, old-fashioned way for us!  Is it a Breach of Promise?--She may
+reckon on her damages: we have daughters of our own.  Is it a suit for
+Divorce?--Well, we have wives of our own, and we can lash, or we can
+spare; that's as it may be; but we'll keep the couple tied, let 'em hate
+as they like, if they can't furnish pork-butchers' reasons for sundering;
+because the man makes the money in this country.--My goodness! what a
+funny people, sir!--It 's our way of holding the balance, ma'am.--But
+would it not be better to rectify the law and the social system, dear
+sir?--Why, ma'am, we find it comfortabler to take cases as they come, in
+the style of our fathers.--But don't you see, my good man, that you are
+offering scapegoats for the comfort of the majority?--Well, ma'am, there
+always were scapegoats, and always will be; we find it comes round pretty
+square in the end.
+
+'And I may be the scapegoat, Emmy!  It is perfectly possible.  The
+grocer, the pork-butcher, drysalter, stationer, tea-merchant, et caetera
+--they sit on me.  I have studied the faces of the juries, and Mr.
+Braddock tells me of their composition.  And he admits that they do
+justice roughly--a rough and tumble country! to quote him--though he says
+they are honest in intention.'
+
+'More shame to the man who drags you before them--if he persists!' Emma
+rejoined.
+
+'He will.  I know him.  I would not have him draw back now,' said Diana,
+catching her breath.  'And, dearest, do not abuse him; for if you do, you
+set me imagining guiltiness.  Oh, heaven!--suppose me publicly pardoned!
+No, I have kinder feelings when we stand opposed.  It is odd, and rather
+frets my conscience, to think of the little resentment I feel.  Hardly
+any!  He has not cause to like his wife.  I can own it, and I am sorry
+for him, heartily.  No two have ever come together so naturally
+antagonistic as we two.  We walked a dozen steps in stupefied union, and
+hit upon crossways.  From that moment it was tug and tug; he me, I him.
+By resisting, I made him a tyrant; and he, by insisting, made me a rebel.
+And he was the maddest of tyrants--a weak one.  My dear, he was also a
+double-dealer.  Or no, perhaps not in design.  He was moved at one time
+by his interests; at another by his idea of his honour.  He took what I
+could get for him, and then turned and drubbed me for getting it.'
+
+'This is the creature you try to excuse!' exclaimed indignant Emma.
+
+'Yes, because--but fancy all the smart things I said being called my
+"sallies"!--can a woman live with it?--because I behaved .  .  .  I
+despised him too much, and I showed it.  He is not a contemptible man
+before the world; he is merely a very narrow one under close inspection.
+I could not--or did not--conceal my feeling.  I showed it not only to
+him, to my friend.  Husband grew to mean to me stifler, lung-contractor,
+iron mask, inquisitor, everything anti-natural.  He suffered under my
+"sallies": and it was the worse for him when he did not perceive their
+drift.  He is an upright man; I have not seen marked meanness.  One might
+build up a respectable figure in negatives.  I could add a row of noughts
+to the single number he cherishes, enough to make a millionnaire of him;
+but strike away the first, the rest are wind.  Which signifies, that if
+you do not take his estimate of himself, you will think little of his:
+negative virtues.  He is not eminently, that is to say, not saliently,
+selfish; not rancorous, not obtrusive--tata-ta-ta.  But dull!--dull as a
+woollen nightcap over eyes and ears and mouth.  Oh! an executioner's
+black cap to me.  Dull, and suddenly staring awake to the idea of his
+honour.  I "rendered" him ridiculous--I had caught a trick of "using
+men's phrases."  Dearest, now that the day of trial draws nigh--you have
+never questioned me, and it was like you to spare me pain--but now I can
+speak of him and myself.'  Diana dropped her voice.  Here was another
+confession.  The proximity of the trial acted like fire on her faded
+recollection of incidents.  It may be that partly the shame of alluding
+to them had blocked her woman's memory.  For one curious operation of the
+charge of guiltiness upon the nearly guiltless is to make them paint
+themselves pure white, to the obliteration of minor spots, until the
+whiteness being acknowledged, or the ordeal imminent, the spots recur and
+press upon their consciences.  She resumed, in a rapid undertone: 'You
+know that a certain degree of independence had been, if not granted by
+him, conquered by me.  I had the habit of it.  Obedience with him is
+imprisonment--he is a blind wall.  He received a commission, greatly to
+his advantage, and was absent.  He seems to have received information of
+some sort.  He returned unexpectedly, at a late hour, and attacked me at
+once, middling violent.  My friend--and that he is! was coming from the
+House for a ten minutes' talk, as usual, on his way home, to refresh him
+after the long sitting and bear-baiting he had nightly to endure.  Now
+let me confess: I grew frightened; Mr. Warwick was "off his head," as
+they say-crazy, and I could not bear the thought of those two meeting.
+While he raged I threw open the window and put the lamp near it, to
+expose the whole interior--cunning as a veteran intriguer: horrible, but
+it had to be done to keep them apart.  He asked me what madness possessed
+me, to sit by an open window at midnight, in view of the public, with a
+damp wind blowing.  I complained of want of air and fanned my forehead.
+I heard the steps on the pavement; I stung him to retort loudly, and I
+was relieved; the steps passed on.  So the trick succeeded--the trick!
+It was the worst I was guilty of, but it was a trick, and it branded me
+trickster.  It teaches me to see myself with an abyss in my nature full
+of infernal possibilities.  I think I am hewn in black rock.  A woman who
+can do as I did by instinct, needs to have an angel always near her, if
+she has not a husband she reveres.'
+
+'We are none of us better than you, dear Tony; only some are more
+fortunate, and many are cowards,' Emma said.  'You acted prudently in a
+wretched situation, partly of your own making, partly of the
+circumstances.  But a nature like yours could not sit still and moan.
+That marriage was to blame!  The English notion of women seems to be that
+we are born white sheep or black; circumstances have nothing to do with
+our colour.  They dread to grant distinctions, and to judge of us
+discerningly is beyond them.  Whether the fiction, that their homes are
+purer than elsewhere, helps to establish the fact, I do not know: there
+is a class that does live honestly; and at any rate it springs from a
+liking for purity; but I am sure that their method of impressing it on
+women has the dangers of things artificial.  They narrow their
+understanding of human nature, and that is not the way to improve the
+breed.'
+
+'I suppose we women are taken to be the second thoughts of the Creator;
+human nature's fringes, mere finishing touches, not a part of the
+texture,' said Diana; 'the pretty ornamentation.  However, I fancy
+I perceive some tolerance growing in the minds of the dominant sex.
+Our old lawyer Mr. Braddock, who appears to have no distaste for
+conversations with me, assures me he expects the day to come when
+women will be encouraged to work at crafts and professions for their
+independence.  That is the secret of the opinion of us at present--our
+dependency.  Give us the means of independence, and we will gain it, and
+have a turn at judging you, my lords!  You shall behold a world reversed.
+Whenever I am distracted by existing circumstances, I lay my finger on
+the material conditions, and I touch the secret.  Individually, it may be
+moral with us; collectively, it is material-gross wrongs, gross hungers.
+I am a married rebel, and thereof comes the social rebel.  I was once a
+dancing and singing girl: You remember the night of the Dublin Ball.
+A Channel sea in uproar, stirred by witches, flows between.'
+
+'You are as lovely as you were then--I could say, lovelier,' said Emma.
+
+'I have unconquerable health, and I wish I could give you the half of it,
+dear.  I work late into the night, and I wake early and fresh in the
+morning.  I do not sing, that is all.  A few days more, and my character
+will be up before the Bull's Head to face him in the arena.  The worst of
+a position like mine is, that it causes me incessantly to think and talk
+of myself.  I believe I think less than I talk, but the subject is
+growing stale; as those who are long dying feel, I dare say--if they
+do not take it as the compensation for their departure.'
+
+The Bull's Head, or British Jury of Twelve, with the wig on it, was faced
+during the latter half of a week of good news.  First, Mr. Thomas
+Redworth was returned to Parliament by a stout majority for the Borough
+of Orrybridge: the Hon. Percy Dacier delivered a brilliant speech in the
+House of Commons, necessarily pleasing to his uncle: Lord Larrian
+obtained the command of the Rock: the house of The Crossways was let
+to a tenant approved by Mr. Braddock: Diana received the opening proof-
+sheets of her little volume, and an instalment of the modest honorarium:
+and finally, the Plaintiff in the suit involving her name was adjudged to
+have not proved his charge.
+
+She heard of it without a change of countenance.
+
+She could not have wished it the reverse; she was exonerated.  But she
+was not free; far from that; and she revenged herself on the friends who
+made much of her triumph and overlooked her plight, by showing no sign of
+satisfaction.  There was in her bosom a revolt at the legal consequences
+of the verdict--or blunt acquiescence of the Law in the conditions
+possibly to be imposed on her unless she went straight to the relieving
+phial; and the burden of keeping it under, set her wildest humour alight,
+somewhat as Redworth remembered of her on the journey from The Crossways
+to Copsley.  This ironic fury, coming of the contrast of the outer and
+the inner, would have been indulged to the extent of permanent injury to
+her disposition had not her beloved Emma, immediately after the tension
+of the struggle ceased, required her tenderest aid.  Lady Dunstane
+chanted victory, and at night collapsed.  By the advice of her physician
+she was removed to Copsley, where Diana's labour of anxious nursing
+restored her through love to a saner spirit.  The hopefulness of life
+must bloom again in the heart whose prayers are offered for a life dearer
+than its own to be preserved.  A little return of confidence in Sir Lukin
+also refreshed her when she saw that the poor creature did honestly, in
+his shaggy rough male fashion, reverence and cling to the flower of souls
+he named as his wife.  His piteous groans of self-accusation during the
+crisis haunted her, and made the conduct and nature of men a bewilderment
+to her still young understanding.  Save for the knot of her sensations
+(hardly a mental memory, but a sullen knot) which she did not disentangle
+to charge him with his complicity in the blind rashness of her marriage,
+she might have felt sisterly, as warmly as she compassionated him.
+
+It was midwinter when Dame Gossip, who keeps the exotic world alive with
+her fanning whispers, related that the lovely Mrs. Warwick had left
+England on board the schooner-yacht Clarissa, with Lord and Lady Esquart,
+for a voyage in the Mediterranean: and (behind her hand) that the reason
+was urgent, inasmuch as she fled to escape the meshes of the terrific net
+of the marital law brutally whirled to capture her by the man her
+husband.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+INTRODUCES THE HON. PERCY DACIER
+
+The Gods of this world's contests, against whom our poor stripped
+individual is commonly in revolt, are, as we know, not miners, they
+are reapers; and if we appear no longer on the surface, they cease to
+bruise us: they will allow an arena character to be cleansed and made
+presentable while enthusiastic friends preserve discretion.  It is
+of course less than magnanimity; they are not proposed to you for your
+worship; they are little Gods, temporary as that great wave, their parent
+human mass of the hour.  But they have one worshipful element in them,
+which is, the divine insistency upon there being two sides to a case
+--to every case.  And the People so far directed by them may boast of
+healthfulness.  Let the individual shriek, the innocent, triumphant,
+have in honesty to admit the fact.  One side is vanquished, according
+to decree of Law, but the superior Council does not allow it to be
+extinguished.
+
+Diana's battle was fought shadowily behind her for the space of a week
+or so, with some advocates on behalf of the beaten man; then it became
+a recollection of a beautiful woman, possibly erring, misvalued by a
+husband, who was neither a man of the world nor a gracious yokefellow,
+nor anything to match her.  She, however, once out of the public flames,
+had to recall her scorchings to be gentle with herself.  Under a defeat,
+she would have been angrily self-vindicated.  The victory of the ashen
+laurels drove her mind inward to gird at the hateful yoke, in compassion
+for its pair of victims.  Quite earnestly by such means, yet always
+bearing a comical eye on her subterfuges, she escaped the extremes of
+personal blame.  Those advocates of her opponent in and out of court
+compelled her honest heart to search within and own to faults.  But were
+they not natural faults?  It was her marriage; it was marriage in the
+abstract: her own mistake and the world's clumsy machinery of
+civilization: these were the capital offenders: not the wife who would
+laugh ringingly, and would have friends of the other sex, and shot her
+epigrams at the helpless despot, and was at times--yes, vixenish;
+a nature driven to it, but that was the word.  She was too generous to
+recount her charges against the vanquished.  If his wretched jealousy had
+ruined her, the secret high tribunal within her bosom, which judged her
+guiltless for putting the sword between their marriage tie when they
+stood as one, because a quarrelling couple could not in honour play the
+embracing, pronounced him just pardonable.  She distinguished that he
+could only suppose, manlikely, one bad cause for the division.
+
+To this extent she used her unerring brains, more openly than on her
+night of debate at The Crossways.  The next moment she was off in vapour,
+meditating grandly on her independence of her sex and the passions.
+Love! she did not know it, she was not acquainted with either the
+criminal or the domestic God, and persuaded herself that she never could
+be.  She was a Diana of coldness, preferring friendship; she could be the
+friend of men.  There was another who could be the friend of women.  Her
+heart leapt to Redworth.  Conjuring up his clear trusty face, at their
+grasp of hands when parting, she thought of her visions of her future
+about the period of the Dublin Ball, and acknowledged, despite the
+erratic step to wedlock, a gain in having met and proved so true a
+friend.  His face, figure, character, lightest look, lightest word, all
+were loyal signs of a man of honour, cold as she; he was the man to whom
+she could have opened her heart for inspection.  Rejoicing in her
+independence of an emotional sex, the impulsive woman burned with a
+regret that at their parting she had not broken down conventional
+barriers and given her cheek to his lips in the antiinsular fashion with
+a brotherly friend.  And why not when both were cold?  Spirit to spirit,
+she did, delightfully refreshed by her capacity to do so without a throb.
+He had held her hands and looked into her eyes half a minute, like a dear
+comrade; as little arousing her instincts of defensiveness as the
+clearing heavens; and sisterly love for it was his due, a sister's kiss.
+He needed a sister, and should have one in her.  Emma's recollected talk
+of 'Tom Redworth' painted him from head to foot, brought the living man
+over the waters to the deck of the yacht.  A stout champion in the person
+of Tom Redworth was left on British land; but for some reason past
+analysis, intermixed, that is, among a swarm of sensations, Diana named
+her champion to herself with the formal prefix: perhaps because she knew
+a man's Christian name to be dangerous handling.  They differed besides
+frequently in opinion, when the habit of thinking of him as Mr. Redworth
+would be best.  Women are bound to such small observances, and especially
+the beautiful of the sisterhood, whom the world soon warns that they
+carry explosives and must particularly guard against the ignition of
+petty sparks.  She was less indiscreet in her thoughts than in her acts,
+as is the way with the reflective daughter of impulse; though she had
+fine mental distinctions: what she could offer to do 'spirit to spirit,'
+for instance, held nothing to her mind of the intimacy of calling the
+gentleman plain Tom in mere contemplation of him.  Her friend and
+champion was a volunteer, far from a mercenary, and he deserved the
+reward, if she could bestow it unalarmed.  They were to meet in Egypt.
+Meanwhile England loomed the home of hostile forces ready to shock, had
+she been a visible planet, and ready to secrete a virus of her past
+history, had she been making new.
+
+She was happily away, borne by a whiter than swan's wing on the sapphire
+Mediterranean.  Her letters to Emma were peeps of splendour for the
+invalid: her way of life on board the yacht, and sketches of her host and
+hostess as lovers in wedlock on the other side of our perilous forties;
+sketches of the bays, the towns, the people-priests, dames, cavaliers,
+urchins, infants, shifting groups of supple southerners-flashed across
+the page like a web of silk, and were dashed off, redolent of herself,
+as lightly as the silvery spray of the blue waves she furrowed; telling,
+without allusions to the land behind her, that she had dipped in the
+wells of blissful oblivion.  Emma Dunstane, as is usual with those who
+receive exhilarating correspondence from makers of books, condemned the
+authoress in comparison, and now first saw that she had the gift of
+writing.  Only one cry: 'Italy, Eden of exiles!' betrayed the seeming of
+a moan.  She wrote of her poet and others immediately.  Thither had they
+fled; with adieu to England!
+
+How many have waved the adieu!  And it is England nourishing, England
+protecting them, England clothing them in the honours they wear.  Only
+the posturing lower natures, on the level of their buskins, can pluck out
+the pocket-knife of sentimental spite to cut themselves loose from her at
+heart in earnest.  The higher, bleed as they may, too pressingly feel
+their debt.  Diana had the Celtic vivid sense of country.  In England she
+was Irish, by hereditary, and by wilful opposition.  Abroad, gazing along
+the waters, observing, comparing, reflecting, above all, reading of the
+struggles at home, the things done and attempted, her soul of generosity
+made her, though not less Irish, a daughter of Britain.  It is at a
+distance that striving countries should be seen if we would have them in
+the pure idea; and this young woman of fervid mind, a reader of public
+speeches and speculator on the tides of politics (desirous, further, to
+feel herself rather more in the pure idea), began to yearn for England
+long before her term of holiday exile had ended.  She had been flattered
+by her friend, her 'wedded martyr at the stake,' as she named him, to
+believe that she could exercise a judgement in politics--could think,
+even speak acutely, on public affairs.  The reports of speeches delivered
+by the men she knew or knew of, set her thrilling; and she fancied the
+sensibility to be as independent of her sympathy with the orators as her
+political notions were sovereignty above a sex devoted to trifles,
+and the feelings of a woman who had gone through fire.  She fancied it
+confidently, notwithstanding a peculiar intuition that the plunge into
+the nobler business of the world would be a haven of safety for a woman
+with blood and imagination, when writing to Emma: 'Mr. Redworth's great
+success in Parliament is good in itself, whatever his views of present
+questions; and I do not heed them when I look to what may be done by a
+man of such power in striking at unjust laws, which keep the really
+numerically better-half of the population in a state of slavery.  If he
+had been a lawyer!  It must be a lawyer's initiative--a lawyer's Bill.
+Mr. Percy Dacier also spoke well, as might have been expected, and his
+uncle's compliment to him was merited.  Should you meet him sound him.
+He has read for the Bar, and is younger than Mr. Redworth.  The very
+young men and the old are our hope.  The middleaged are hard and fast for
+existing facts.  We pick our leaders on the slopes, the incline and
+decline of the mountain--not on the upper table-land midway, where all
+appears to men so solid, so tolerably smooth, save for a few
+excrescences, roughnesses, gradually to be levelled at their leisure;
+which induces one to protest that the middle-age of men is their time of
+delusion.  It is no paradox.  They may be publicly useful in a small way.
+I do not deny it at all.  They must be near the gates of life--the
+opening or the closing--for their minds to be accessible to the urgency
+of the greater questions.  Otherwise the world presents itself to them
+under too settled an aspect--unless, of course, Vesuvian Revolution
+shakes the land.  And that touches only their nerves.  I dream of some
+old Judge!  There is one--if having caught we could keep him.  But I
+dread so tricksy a pilot.  You have guessed him--the ancient Puck!
+We have laughed all day over the paper telling us of his worrying the
+Lords.  Lady Esquart congratulates her husband on being out of it.  Puck
+'biens ride' and bewigged might perhaps--except that at the critical
+moment he would be sure to plead allegiance to Oberon.  However, the work
+will be performed by some one: I am prophetic:--when maidens are
+grandmothers!--when your Tony is wearing a perpetual laugh in the
+unhusbanded regions where there is no institution of the wedding-tie.'
+
+For the reason that she was not to participate in the result of the old
+Judge's or young hero's happy championship of the cause of her sex, she
+conceived her separateness high aloof, and actually supposed she was a
+contemplative, simply speculative political spirit, impersonal albeit a
+woman.  This, as Emma, smiling at the lines, had not to learn, was always
+her secret pride of fancy--the belief in her possession of a disengaged
+intellect.
+
+The strange illusion, so clearly exposed to her correspondent, was
+maintained through a series of letters very slightly descriptive, dated
+from the Piraeus, the Bosphorus, the coasts of the Crimea, all more or
+less relating to the latest news of the journals received on board the
+yacht, and of English visitors fresh from the country she now seemed fond
+of calling 'home.'  Politics, and gentle allusions to the curious
+exhibition of 'love in marriage' shown by her amiable host and hostess:
+'these dear Esquarts, who are never tired of one another, but courtly
+courting, tempting me to think it possible that a fortunate selection
+and a mutual deference may subscribe to human happiness:--filled the
+paragraphs.  Reviews of her first literary venture were mentioned once:
+'I was well advised by Mr. Redworth in putting ANTONIA for authoress.
+She is a buff jerkin to the stripes, and I suspect that the signature of
+D. E. M., written in full, would have cawed woefully to hear that her
+style is affected, her characters nullities, her cleverness forced, etc.,
+etc.  As it is, I have much the same contempt for poor Antonia's
+performance. Cease penning, little fool!  She writes, "with some
+comprehension of the passion of love."  I know her to be a stranger to
+the earliest cry.  So you see, dear, that utter ignorance is the mother
+of the Art.  Dialogues "occasionally pointed."  She has a sister who may
+do better.--But why was I not apprenticed to a serviceable profession or
+a trade?  I perceive now that a hanger-on of the market had no right to
+expect a happier fate than mine has been.'
+
+On the Nile, in the winter of the year, Diana met the Hon. Percy Dacier.
+He was introduced to her at Cairo by Redworth.  The two gentlemen had
+struck up a House of Commons acquaintanceship, and finding themselves
+bound for the same destination, had grown friendly.  Redworth's arrival
+had been pleasantly expected.  She remarked on Dacier's presence to Emma,
+without sketch or note of him as other than much esteemed by Lord and
+Lady Esquart.  These, with Diana, Redworth, Dacier, the German Eastern
+traveller Schweizerbarth, and the French Consul and Egyptologist
+Duriette, composed a voyaging party up the river, of which expedition
+Redworth was Lady Dunstane's chief writer of the records.  His novel
+perceptiveness and shrewdness of touch made them amusing; and his
+tenderness to the Beauty's coquettry between the two foreign rivals,
+moved a deeper feeling.  The German had a guitar, the Frenchman a voice;
+Diana joined them in harmony.  They complained apart severally of the
+accompaniment and the singer.  Our English criticized them apart; and
+that is at any rate to occupy a post, though it contributes nothing to
+entertainment.  At home the Esquarts had sung duets; Diana had assisted
+Redworth's manly chest-notes at the piano.  Each of them declined to be
+vocal.  Diana sang alone for the credit of the country, Italian and
+French songs, Irish also.  She was in her mood of Planxty Kelly and
+Garryowen all the way.  'Madame est Irlandaise?' Redworth heard the
+Frenchman say, and he owned to what was implied in the answering tone
+of the question.  'We should be dull dogs without the Irish leaven!'
+So Tony in exile still managed to do something for her darling Erin.
+The solitary woman on her heights at Copsley raised an exclamation of,
+'Oh!  that those two had been or could be united!' She was conscious
+of a mystic symbolism in the prayer.
+
+She was not apprehensive of any ominous intervention of another.  Writing
+from Venice, Diana mentioned Mr. Percy Dacier as being engaged to an
+heiress; 'A Miss Asper, niece of a mighty shipowner, Mr. Quintin Manx,
+Lady Esquart tells me: money fabulous, and necessary to a younger son
+devoured with ambition.  The elder brother, Lord Creedmore, is a common
+Nimrod, always absent in Hungary, Russia, America, hunting somewhere.
+Mr. Dacier will be in the Cabinet with the next Ministry.'  No more of
+him.  A new work by ANTONIA was progressing.
+
+The Summer in South Tyrol passed like a royal procession before young
+eyes for Diana, and at the close of it, descending the Stelvio, idling
+through the Valtelline, Como Lake was reached, Diana full of her work,
+living the double life of the author.  At Bellagio one afternoon Mr.
+Percy Dacier appeared.  She remembered subsequently a disappointment
+she felt in not beholding Mr. Redworth either with him or displacing him.
+If engaged to a lady, he was not an ardent suitor; nor was he a pointedly
+complimentary acquaintance.  His enthusiasm was reserved for Italian
+scenery.  She had already formed a sort of estimate of his character, as
+an indifferent observer may do, and any woman previous to the inflaming
+of her imagination, if that is in store for her; and she now fell to work
+resetting the puzzle it became as soon her positive conclusions had to be
+shaped again.  'But women never can know young men,' she wrote to Emma,
+after praising his good repute as one of the brotherhood.  'He drops
+pretty sentences now and then: no compliments; milky nuts.  Of course he
+has a head, or he would not be where he is--and that seems always to me
+the most enviable place a young man can occupy.'  She observed in him a
+singular conflicting of a buoyant animal nature with a curb of
+studiousness, as if the fardels of age were piling on his shoulders
+before youth had quitted its pastures.
+
+His build of limbs and his features were those of the finely-bred
+English; he had the English taste for sports, games, manly diversions;
+and in the bloom of life, under thirty, his head was given to bend.  The
+head bending on a tall upright figure, where there was breadth of chest,
+told of weights working.  She recollected his open look, larger than
+inquiring, at the introduction to her; and it recurred when she uttered
+anything specially taking.  What it meant was past a guess, though
+comparing it with the frank directness of Redworth's eyes, she saw the
+difference between a look that accepted her and one that dilated on two
+opinions.
+
+Her thought of the gentleman was of a brilliant young charioteer in the
+ruck of the race, watchful for his chance to push to the front; and she
+could have said that a dubious consort might spoil a promising career.
+It flattered her to think that she sometimes prompted him, sometimes
+illumined.  He repeated sentences she had spoken.  'I shall be better
+able to describe Mr. Dacier when you and I sit together, my Emmy, and a
+stroke here and there completes the painting.  Set descriptions are good
+for puppets.  Living men and women are too various in the mixture
+fashioning them--even the "external presentment"--to be livingly rendered
+in a formal sketch.  I may tell you his eyes are pale blue, his features
+regular, his hair silky, brownish, his legs long, his head rather
+stooping (only the head), his mouth commonly closed; these are the facts,
+and you have seen much the same in a nursery doll.  Such literary craft
+is of the nursery.  So with landscapes.  The art of the pen (we write on
+darkness) is to rouse the inward vision, instead of labouring with a
+Drop-scene brush, as if it were to the eye; because our flying minds
+cannot contain a protracted description.  That is why the poets, who
+spring imagination with a word or a phrase, paint lasting pictures.  The
+Shakespearian, the Dantesque, are in a line, two at most.  He lends an
+attentive ear when I speak, agrees or has a quaint pucker of the eyebrows
+dissenting inwardly.  He lacks mental liveliness--cheerfulness, I should
+say, and is thankful to have it imparted.  One suspects he would be a
+dull domestic companion.  He has a veritable thirst for hopeful views of
+the world, and no spiritual distillery of his own.  He leans to
+depression.  Why!  The broken reed you call your Tony carries a cargo,
+all of her manufacture--she reeks of secret stills; and here is a young
+man--a sapling oak--inclined to droop.  His nature has an air of
+imploring me que je d'arrose!  I begin to perform Mrs. Dr. Pangloss on
+purpose to brighten him--the mind, the views.  He is not altogether
+deficient in conversational gaiety, and he shines in exercise.  But the
+world is a poor old ball bounding down a hill--to an Irish melody in the
+evening generally, by request.  So far of Mr. Percy Dacier, of whom I
+have some hopes--distant, perhaps delusive--that he may be of use to
+our cause.  He listens.  It is an auspicious commencement.'
+
+Lugano is the Italian lake most lovingly encircled by mountain arms, and
+every height about it may be scaled with esce.  The heights have their
+nest of waters below for a home scene, the southern Swiss peaks, with
+celestial Monta Rosa, in prospect.  It was there that Diana reawakened,
+after the trance of a deadly draught, to the glory of the earth and her
+share in it.  She wakened like the Princess of the Kiss; happily not to
+kisses; to no sign, touch or call that she could trace backward.  The
+change befell her without a warning.  After writing deliberately to her
+friend Emma, she laid down her pen and thought of nothing; and into this
+dreamfulness a wine passed, filling her veins, suffusing her mind,
+quickening her soul: and coming whence?  out of air, out of the yonder of
+air.  She could have imagined a seraphic presence in the room, that bade
+her arise and live; take the cup of the wells of youth arrested at her
+lips by her marriage; quit her wintry bondage for warmth, light, space,
+the quick of simple being.  And the strange pure ecstasy was not a
+transient electrification; it came in waves on a continuous tide; looking
+was living; walking flying.  She hardly knew that she slept.  The heights
+she had seen rosy at eve were marked for her ascent in the dawn.  Sleep
+was one wink, and fresh as the dewy field and rockflowers on her way
+upward, she sprang to more and more of heaven, insatiable, happily
+chirruping over her possessions.  The threading of the town among the
+dear common people before others were abroad, was a pleasure and pleasant
+her solitariness threading the gardens at the base of the rock, only she
+astir; and the first rough steps of the winding footpath, the first
+closed buds, the sharper air, the uprising of the mountain with her
+ascent; and pleasant too was her hunger and the nibble at a little loaf
+of bread.  A linnet sang in her breast, an eagle lifted her feet.  The
+feet were verily winged, as they are in a season of youth when the blood
+leaps to light from the pressure of the under forces, like a source at
+the wellheads, and the whole creature blooms, vital in every energy as a
+spirit.  To be a girl again was magical.  She could fancy her having
+risen from the dead.  And to be a girl, with a woman's broader vision and
+receptiveness of soul, with knowledge of evil, and winging to ethereal
+happiness, this was a revelation of our human powers.
+
+She attributed the change to the influences of nature's beauty and
+grandeur.  Nor had her woman's consciousness to play the chrysalis in any
+shy recesses of her heart; she was nowhere veiled or torpid; she was
+illumined, like the Salvatore she saw in the evening beams and mounted in
+the morning's; and she had not a spot of seeresy; all her nature flew and
+bloomed; she was bird, flower, flowing river, a quivering sensibility
+unweighted, enshrouded.  Desires and hopes would surely have weighted and
+shrouded her.  She had none, save for the upper air, the eyes of the
+mountain.
+
+Which was the dream--her past life or this ethereal existence?  But this
+ran spontaneously, and the other had often been stimulated--her
+vivaciousness on the Nile-boat, for a recent example.  She had not a
+doubt that her past life was the dream, or deception: and for the reason
+that now she was compassionate, large of heart toward all beneath her.
+Let them but leave her free, they were forgiven, even to prayers for
+their well-being!  The plural number in the case was an involuntary
+multiplying of the single, coming of her incapacity during this elevation
+and rapture of the senses to think distinctly of that One who had
+discoloured her opening life.  Freedom to breathe, gaze, climb, grow with
+the grasses, fly with the clouds, to muse, to sing, to be an unclaimed
+self, dispersed upon earth, air, sky, to find a keener transfigured self
+in that radiation--she craved no more.
+
+Bear in mind her beauty, her charm of tongue, her present state of white
+simplicity in fervour: was there ever so perilous a woman for the most
+guarded and clearest-eyed of young men to meet at early morn upon a
+mountain side?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+TREATS OF A MIDNIGHT BELL, AND OF A SCENE OF EARLY MORNING
+
+On a round of the mountains rising from Osteno, South eastward of Lugano,
+the Esquart party rose from the natural grotto and headed their carriages
+up and down the defiles, halting for a night at Rovio, a little village
+below the Generoso, lively with waterfalls and watercourses; and they
+fell so in love with the place, that after roaming along the flowery
+borderways by moonlight, they resolved to rest there two or three days
+and try some easy ascents.  In the diurnal course of nature, being
+pleasantly tired, they had the avowed intention of sleeping there; so
+they went early to their beds, and carelessly wished one another good-
+night, none of them supposing slumber to be anywhere one of the warlike
+arts, a paradoxical thing you must battle for and can only win at last
+when utterly beaten.  Hard by their inn, close enough for a priestly
+homily to have been audible, stood a church campanile, wherein hung a
+Bell, not ostensibly communicating with the demons of the pit; in
+daylight rather a merry comrade.  But at night, when the children of
+nerves lay stretched, he threw off the mask.  As soon as they had fairly
+nestled, he smote their pillows a shattering blow, loud for the retold
+preluding quarters, incredibly clanging the number ten.  Then he waited
+for neighbouring campanili to box the ears of slumber's votaries in turn;
+whereupon, under pretence of excessive conscientiousness, or else
+oblivious of his antecedent, damnable misconduct, or perhaps in actual
+league and trapdoor conspiracy with the surging goblin hosts beneath us,
+he resumed his blaring strokes, a sonorous recapitulation of the number;
+all the others likewise.  It was an alarum fit to warn of Attila or
+Alaric; and not, simply the maniacal noise invaded the fruitful provinces
+of sleep like Hun and Vandal, the irrational repetition ploughed the
+minds of those unhappy somnivolents, leaving them worse than sheared by
+barbarians, disrupt, as by earthquake, with the unanswerable question to
+Providence, Why!--Why twice?
+
+Designing slumberers are such infants.  When they have undressed and
+stretched themselves, flat, it seems that they have really gone back to
+their mothers' breasts, and they fret at whatsoever does not smack of
+nature, or custom.  The cause of a repetition so senseless in its
+violence, and so unnecessary, set them querying and kicking until the
+inevitable quarters recommenced.  Then arose an insurgent rabble in their
+bosoms, it might be the loosened imps of darkness, urging them to
+speculate whether the proximate monster about to dole out the eleventh
+hour in uproar would again forget himself and repeat his dreary
+arithmetic a second time; for they were unaware of his religious
+obligation, following the hour of the district, to inform them of the
+tardy hour of Rome.  They waited in suspense, curiosity enabling them to
+bear the first crash callously.  His performance was the same.  And now
+they took him for a crazy engine whose madness had infected the whole
+neighbourhood.  Now was the moment to fight for sleep in contempt of him,
+and they began by simulating an entry into the fortress they were to
+defend, plunging on their pillows, battening down their eyelids,
+breathing with a dreadful regularity.  Alas!  it came to their knowledge
+that the Bell was in possession and they the besiegers.  Every resonant
+quarter was anticipated up to the blow, without averting its murderous
+abruptness; and an executioner Midnight that sounded, in addition to the
+reiterated quarters, four and twenty ringing hammerstrokes, with the
+aching pause between the twelves, left them the prey of the legions of
+torturers which are summed, though not described, in the title of a
+sleepless night.
+
+From that period the curse was milder, but the victims raged.  They swam
+on vasty deeps, they knocked at rusty gates, they shouldered all the
+weapons of black Insomnia's armoury and became her soldiery, doing her
+will upon themselves.  Of her originally sprang the inspired teaching of
+the doom of men to excruciation in endlessness.  She is the fountain of
+the infinite ocean whereon the exceedingly sensitive soul is tumbled
+everlastingly, with the diversion of hot pincers to appease its appetite
+for change.
+
+Dacier was never the best of sleepers.  He had taken to exercise his
+brains prematurely, not only in learning, but also in reflection; and a
+reflectiveness that is indulged before we have a rigid mastery of the
+emotions, or have slain them, is apt to make a young man more than
+commonly a child of nerves: nearly as much so as the dissipated, with the
+difference that they are hilarious while wasting their treasury, which he
+is not; and he may recover under favouring conditions, which is a point
+of vantage denied to them.  Physically he had stout reserves, for he had
+not disgraced the temple.  His intemperateness lay in the craving to rise
+and lead: a precocious ambition.  This apparently modest young man
+started with an aim--and if in the distance and with but a slingstone,
+like the slender shepherd fronting the Philistine, all his energies were
+in his aim--at Government.  He had hung on the fringe of an
+Administration.  His party was out, and he hoped for higher station on
+its return to power.  Many perplexities were therefore buzzing about his
+head; among them at present one sufficiently magnified and voracious to
+swallow the remainder.  He added force to the interrogation as to why
+that Bell should sound its inhuman strokes twice, by asking himself why
+he was there to hear it!  A strange suspicion of a bewitchment might have
+enlightened him if he had been a man accustomed to yield to the peculiar
+kind of sorcery issuing from that sex.  He rather despised the power of
+women over men: and nevertheless he was there, listening to that Bell,
+instead of having obeyed the call of his family duties, when the latter
+were urgent.  He had received letters at Lugano, summoning him home,
+before he set forth on his present expedition.  The noisy alarum told him
+he floundered in quags, like a silly creature chasing a marsh-lamp.  But
+was it so?  Was it not, on the contrary, a serious pursuit of the secret
+of a woman's character?--Oh, a woman and her character!  Ordinary women
+and their characters might set to work to get what relationship and
+likeness they could.  They had no secret to allure.  This one had: she
+had the secret of lake waters under rock, unfathomable in limpidness.
+He could not think of her without shooting at nature, and nature's very
+sweetest and subtlest, for comparison.  As to her sex, his active man's
+contempt of the petticoated secret attractive to boys and graylings, made
+him believe that in her he hunted the mind and the spirit: perchance a
+double mind, a twilighted spirit; but not a mere woman.  She bore no
+resemblance to the bundle of women.  Well, she was worth studying; she
+had ideas, and could give ear to ideas.  Furthermore, a couple of the
+members of his family inclined to do her injustice.  At least, they
+judged her harshly, owing, he thought, to an inveterate opinion they held
+regarding Lord Dannisburgh's obliquity in relation to women.  He shared
+it, and did not concur in, their verdict upon the woman implicated.  That
+is to say, knowing something of her now, he could see the possibility of
+her innocence in the special charm that her mere sparkle of features and
+speech, and her freshness would have for a man like his uncle.  The
+possibility pleaded strongly on her behalf, while the darker possibility
+weighted by his uncle's reputation plucked at him from below.
+
+She was delightful to hear, delightful to see; and her friends loved her
+and had faith in her.  So clever a woman might be too clever for her
+friends!  .  .  .
+
+The circle he moved in hummed of women, prompting novices as well as
+veterans to suspect that the multitude of them, and notably the fairest,
+yet more the cleverest, concealed the serpent somewhere.
+
+She certainly had not directed any of her arts upon him.  Besides he was
+half engaged.  And that was a burning perplexity; not because of abstract
+scruples touching the necessity for love in marriage.  The young lady,
+great heiress though she was, and willing, as she allowed him to assume;
+graceful too, reputed a beauty; struck him cold.  He fancied her
+transparent, only Arctic.  Her transparency displayed to him all the
+common virtues, and a serene possession of the inestimable and eminent
+one outweighing all; but charm, wit, ardour, intercommunicative
+quickness, and kindling beauty, airy grace, were qualities that a man,
+it seemed, had to look for in women spotted by a doubt of their having
+the chief and priceless.
+
+However, he was not absolutely plighted.  Nor did it matter to him
+whether this or that woman concealed the tail of the serpent and trail,
+excepting the singular interest this woman managed to excite, and so
+deeply as set him wondering how that Resurrection Bell might be affecting
+her ability to sleep.  Was she sleeping?--or waking?  His nervous
+imagination was a torch that alternately lighted her lying asleep with
+the innocent, like a babe, and tossing beneath the overflow of her dark
+hair, hounded by haggard memories.  She fluttered before him in either
+aspect; and another perplexity now was to distinguish within himself
+which was the aspect he preferred.  Great Nature brought him thus to
+drink of her beauty, under the delusion that the act was a speculation
+on her character.
+
+The Bell, with its clash, throb and long swoon of sound, reminded him of
+her name: Diana!--An attribute?  or a derision?
+
+It really mattered nothing to him, save for her being maligned; and if
+most unfairly, then that face of the varying expressions, and the rich
+voice, and the remembered gentle and taking words coming from her,
+appealed to him with a supplicating vividness that pricked his heart to
+leap.
+
+He was dozing when the Bell burst through the thin division between
+slumber and wakefulness, recounting what seemed innumerable peals, hard
+on his cranium.  Gray daylight blanched the window and the bed: his watch
+said five of the morning.  He thought of the pleasure of a bath beneath
+some dashing spray-showers; and jumped up to dress, feeling a queer
+sensation of skin in his clothes, the sign of a feverish night; and
+yawning he went into the air.  Leftward the narrow village street led to
+the footway along which he could make for the mountain-wall.  He cast one
+look at the head of the campanile, silly as an owlish roysterer's glazed
+stare at the young Aurora, and hurried his feet to check the yawns coming
+alarmingly fast, in the place of ideas.
+
+His elevation above the valley was about the kneecap of the Generoso.
+Waters of past rain-clouds poured down the mountain-sides like veins of
+metal, here and there flinging off a shower on the busy descent; only
+dubiously animate in the lack lustre of the huge bulk piled against a
+yellow East that wafted fleets of pinky cloudlets overhead.  He mounted
+his path to a level with inviting grassmounds where water circled,
+running from scoops and cups to curves and brook-streams, and in his
+fancy calling to him to hear them.  To dip in them was his desire.  To
+roll and shiver braced by the icy flow was the spell to break that
+baleful incantation of the intolerable night; so he struck across a ridge
+of boulders, wreck of a landslip from the height he had hugged, to the
+open space of shadowed undulations, and soon had his feet on turf.
+Heights to right and to left, and between them, aloft, a sky the rosy
+wheelcourse of the chariot of morn, and below, among the knolls, choice
+of sheltered nooks where waters whispered of secresy to satisfy Diana
+herself.  They have that whisper and waving of secresy in secret scenery;
+they beckon to the bath; and they conjure classic visions of the pudency
+of the Goddess irate or unsighted.  The semi-mythological state of mind,
+built of old images and favouring haunts, was known to Dacier.  The name
+of Diana, playing vaguely on his consciousness, helped to it.  He had no
+definite thought of the mortal woman when the highest grass-roll near the
+rock gave him view of a bowered source and of a pool under a chain of
+cascades, bounded by polished shelves and slabs.  The very spot for him,
+he decided at the first peep; and at the second, with fingers
+instinctively loosening his waist-coat buttons for a commencement, he
+shouldered round and strolled away, though not at a rapid pace, nor far
+before he halted.
+
+That it could be no other than she, the figure he had seen standing
+beside the pool, he was sure.  Why had he turned?  Thoughts thick and
+swift as a blush in the cheeks of seventeen overcame him; and queen of
+all, the thought bringing the picture of this mountain-solitude to
+vindicate a woman shamefully assailed.--She who found her pleasure in
+these haunts of nymph and Goddess, at the fresh cold bosom of nature,
+must be clear as day.  She trusted herself to the loneliness here, and to
+the honour of men, from a like irreflective sincereness.  She was unable
+to imagine danger where her own impelling thirst was pure.  .  .
+
+The thoughts, it will be discerned, were but flashes of a momentary
+vivid sensibility.  Where a woman's charm has won half the battle, her
+character is an advancing standard and sings victory, let her do no more
+than take a quiet morning walk before breakfast.
+
+But why had he turned his back on her?  There was nothing in his presence
+to alarm, nothing in her appearance to forbid.  The motive and the
+movement were equally quaint; incomprehensible to him; for after putting
+himself out of sight, he understood the absurdity of the supposition that
+she would seek the secluded sylvan bath for the same purpose as he.  Yet
+now he was, debarred from going to meet her.  She might have an impulse
+to bathe her feet.  Her name was Diana .  .  .  .
+
+Yes, and a married woman; and a proclaimed one!
+
+And notwithstanding those brassy facts, he was ready to side with the
+evidence declaring her free from stain; and further, to swear that her
+blood was Diana's!
+
+Nor had Dacier ever been particularly poetical about women.  The present
+Diana had wakened his curiosity, had stirred his interest in her, pricked
+his admiration, but gradually, until a sleepless night with its flock of
+raven-fancies under that dominant Bell, ended by colouring her, the
+moment she stood in his eyes, as freshly as the morning heavens.  We
+are much influenced in youth by sleepless nights: they disarm, they
+predispose us to submit to soft occasion; and in our youth occasion
+is always coming.
+
+He heard her voice.  She had risen up the grass-mound, and he hung
+brooding half-way down.  She was dressed in some texture of the hue of
+lavender.  A violet scarf loosely knotted over the bosom opened on her
+throat.  The loop of her black hair curved under a hat of gray beaver.
+Memorably radiant was her face.
+
+They met, exchanged greetings, praised the beauty of the morning, and
+struck together on the Bell.  She laughed: 'I heard it at ten; I slept
+till four.  I never wake later.  I was out in the air by half-past.  Were
+you disturbed?'
+
+He alluded to his troubles with the Bell.
+
+'It sounded like a felon's heart in skeleton ribs,' he said.
+
+'Or a proser's tongue in a hollow skull,' said she.
+
+He bowed to her conversible readiness, and at once fell into the
+background, as he did only with her, to perform accordant bass in their
+dialogue; for when a woman lightly caps our strained remarks, we
+gallantly surrender the leadership, lest she should too cuttingly
+assert her claim.
+
+Some sweet wild cyclamen flowers were at her breast.  She held in her
+left hand a bunch of buds and blown cups of the pale purple meadow-
+crocus.  He admired them.  She told him to look round.  He confessed to
+not having noticed them in the grass: what was the name?  Colchicum, in
+Botany, she said.
+
+'These are plucked to be sent to a friend; otherwise I'm reluctant to
+take the life of flowers for a whim.  Wild flowers, I mean.  I am not
+sentimental about garden flowers: they are cultivated for decoration,
+grown for clipping.'
+
+'I suppose they don't carry the same signification,' said Dacier, in the
+tone of a pupil to such themes.
+
+'They carry no feeling,' said she.  'And that is my excuse for plucking
+these, where they seem to spring like our town-dream of happiness.  I
+believe they are sensible of it too; but these must do service to my
+invalid friend, who cannot travel.  Are you ever as much interested in
+the woes of great ladies as of country damsels?  I am not--not unless
+they have natural distinction.  You have met Lady Dunstane?'
+
+The question sounded artless.  Dacier answered that he thought he had
+seen her somewhere once, and Diana shut her lips on a rising under-smile.
+
+'She is the coeur d'or of our time; the one soul I would sacrifice these
+flowers to.'
+
+'A bit of a blue-stocking, I think I have heard said.'
+
+'She might have been admitted to the Hotel Rambouillet, without being
+anything of a Precieuse.  She is the woman of the largest heart now
+beating.'
+
+'Mr. Redworth talked of her.'
+
+'As she deserved, I am sure.'
+
+'Very warmly.'
+
+'He would!'
+
+'He told me you were the Damon and Pythias of women.'
+
+'Her one fault is an extreme humility that makes her always play second
+to me; and as I am apt to gabble, I take the lead; and I am froth in
+comparison.  I can reverence my superiors even when tried by intimacy
+with them.  She is the next heavenly thing to heaven that I know.  Court
+her, if ever you come across her.  Or have you a man's horror of women
+with brains?'
+
+'Am I expressing it?' said he.
+
+'Do not breathe London or Paris here on me.'  She fanned the crocuses
+under her chin.  'The early morning always has this--I wish I had a
+word!--touch .  .  . whisper .  .  . gleam .  .  . beat of wings--I envy
+poets now more than ever!--of Eden, I was going to say.  Prose can paint
+evening and moonlight, but poets are needed to sing the dawn.  That is
+because prose is equal to melancholy stuff.  Gladness requires the finer
+language.  Otherwise we have it coarse--anything but a reproduction.
+You politicians despise the little distinctions "twixt tweedledum and
+tweedledee," I fancy.'
+
+Of the poetic sort, Dacier's uncle certainly did.  For himself he
+confessed to not having thought much on them.
+
+'But how divine is utterance!' she said.  'As we to the brutes, poets are
+to us.'
+
+He listened somewhat with the head of the hanged.  A beautiful woman
+choosing to rhapsodize has her way, and is not subjected to the critical
+commentary within us.  He wondered whether she had discoursed in such a
+fashion to his uncle.
+
+'I can read good poetry,' said he.
+
+'If you would have this valley--or mountain-cleft, one should call it--
+described, only verse could do it for you,' Diana pursued, and stopped,
+glanced at his face, and smiled.  She had spied the end of a towel
+peeping out of one of his pockets.  'You came out for a bath!  Go back,
+by all means, and mount that rise of grass where you first saw me; and
+down on the other side, a little to the right, you will find the very
+place for a bath, at a corner of the rock--a natural fountain; a bubbling
+pool in a ring of brushwood, with falling water, so tempting that I could
+have pardoned a push: about five feet deep.  Lose no time.'
+
+He begged to assure her that he would rather stroll with her: it had been
+only a notion of bathing by chance when he pocketed the towel.
+
+'Dear me,' she cried, 'if I had been a man I should have scurried off at
+a signal of release, quick as a hare I once woke up in a field with my
+foot on its back.'
+
+Dacier's eyebrows knotted a trifle over her eagerness to dismiss him: he
+was not used to it, but rather to be courted by women, and to condescend.
+
+'I shall not long, I'm afraid, have the pleasure of walking beside you
+and hearing you.  I had letters at Lugano.  My uncle is unwell, I hear.'
+
+'Lord Dannisburgh?'
+
+The name sprang from her lips unhesitatingly.
+
+His nodded affirmative altered her face and her voice.
+
+'It is not a grave illness?'
+
+'They rather fear it.'
+
+'You had the news at Lugano?'
+
+He answered the implied reproach: 'I can be of no, service.'
+
+'But surely!'
+
+'It's even doubtful that he would be bothered to receive me.  We hold no
+views in common--excepting one.'
+
+'Could I?' she exclaimed.  'O that I might!  If he is really ill !  But
+if it is actually serious he would perhaps have a wish .  .  .  I can
+nurse.  I know I have the power to cheer him.  You ought indeed to be in
+England.'
+
+Dacier said he had thought it better to wait for later reports.  'I shall
+drive to Lugano this afternoon, and act on the information I get there.
+Probably it ends my holiday.'
+
+'Will you do me the favour to write me word?--and especially tell me if
+you think he would like to have me near him,' said Diana.  'And let him
+know that if he wants nursing or cheerful companionship, I am at any
+moment ready to come.'
+
+The flattery of a beautiful young woman to wait on him would be very
+agreeable to Lord Dannisburgh, Dacier conceived.  Her offer to go was
+possibly purely charitable.  But the prudence of her occupation of the
+post obscured whatever appeared admirable in her devotedness.  Her choice
+of a man like Lord Dannisburgh for the friend to whom she could sacrifice
+her good name less falteringly than she gathered those field-flowers was
+inexplicable; and she herself a darker riddle at each step of his
+reading.
+
+He promised curtly to write.  'I will do my best to hit a flying
+address.'
+
+'Your Club enables me to hit a permanent one that will establish the
+communication,' said Diana.  'We shall not sleep another night at Rovio.
+Lady Esquart is the lightest of sleepers, and if you had a restless time,
+she and her husband must have been in purgatory.  Besides, permit me to
+say, you should be with your party.  The times are troublous--not for
+holidays!  Your holiday has had a haunted look, creditably to your
+conscience as a politician.  These Corn Law agitations!'
+
+'Ah, but no politics here!' said Dacier.
+
+'Politics everywhere!--in the Courts of Faery!  They are not discord to
+me.'
+
+'But not the last day--the last hour!' he pleaded.
+
+'Well!  only do not forget your assurance to me that you would give some
+thoughts to Ireland--and the cause of women.  Has it slipped from your
+memory?'
+
+'If I see the chance of serving you, you may trust to me.'
+
+She sent up an interjection on the misfortune of her not having been born
+a man.
+
+It was to him the one smart of sourness in her charm as a woman.
+
+Among the boulder-stones of the ascent to the path, he ventured to
+propose a little masculine assistance in a hand stretched mutely.
+Although there was no great need for help, her natural kindliness checked
+the inclination to refuse it.  When their hands disjoined she found
+herself reddening.  She cast it on the exertion.  Her heart was
+throbbing.  It might be the exertion likewise.
+
+He walked and talked much more airily along the descending pathway,
+as if he had suddenly become more intimately acquainted with her.
+
+She listened, trying to think of the manner in which he might be taught
+to serve that cause she had at heart; and the colour deepened on her
+cheeks till it set fire to her underlying consciousness: blood to spirit.
+A tremour of alarm ran through her.
+
+His request for one of the crocuses to keep as a souvenir of the morning
+was refused.  'They are sacred; they were all devoted to my friend when I
+plucked them.'
+
+He pointed to a half-open one, with the petals in disparting pointing to
+junction, and compared it to the famous tiptoe ballet-posture, arms above
+head and fingers like swallows meeting in air, of an operatic danseuse of
+the time.
+
+'I do not see it, because I will not see it,' she said, and she found a
+personal cooling and consolement in the phrase.--We have this power of
+resisting invasion of the poetic by the commonplace, the spirit by the
+blood, if we please, though you men may not think that we have!  Her
+alarmed sensibilities bristled and made head against him as an enemy.
+She fancied (for the aforesaid reason--because she chose) that it was on
+account of the offence to her shy morning pleasure by his Londonizing.
+At any other moment her natural liveliness and trained social ease would
+have taken any remark on the eddies of the tide of converse; and so she
+told herself, and did not the less feel wounded, adverse, armed.  He
+seemed somehow--to have dealt a mortal blow to the happy girl she had
+become again.  The woman she was protested on behalf of the girl, while
+the girl in her heart bent lowered sad eyelids to the woman; and which of
+them was wiser of the truth she could not have said, for she was honestly
+not aware of the truth, but she knew she was divided in halves, with one
+half pitying the other, one rebuking: and all because of the incongruous
+comparison of a wild flower to an opera dancer!  Absurd indeed.  We human
+creatures are the silliest on earth, most certainly.
+
+Dacier had observed the blush, and the check to her flowing tongue did
+not escape him as they walked back to the inn down the narrow street of
+black rooms, where the women gossiped at the fountain and the cobbler
+threaded on his doorstep.  His novel excitement supplied the deficiency,
+sweeping him past minor reflections.  He was, however, surprised to hear
+her tell Lady Esquart, as soon as they were together at the breakfast-
+table, that he had the intention of starting for England; and further
+surprised, and slightly stung too, when on the poor lady's, moaning over
+her recollection of the midnight Bell, and vowing she could not attempt
+to sleep another night in the place, Diana declared her resolve to stay
+there one day longer with her maid, and explore the neighbourhood for the
+wild flowers in which it abounded.  Lord and Lady Esquart agreed to
+anything agreeable to her, after excusing themselves for the necessitated
+flight, piteously relating the story of their sufferings.  My lord could
+have slept, but he had remained awake to comfort my lady.
+
+'True knightliness!' Diana said, in praise of these long married lovers;
+and she asked them what they had talked of during the night.
+
+'You, my dear, partly,' said Lady Esquart.
+
+'For an opiate?'
+
+'An invocation of the morning,' said Dacier.
+
+Lady Esquart looked at Diana and, at him.  She thought it was well that
+her fair friend should stay.  It was then settled for Diana to rejoin
+them the next evening at Lugano, thence to proceed to Luino on the
+Maggiore.
+
+'I fear it is good-bye for me,' Dacier said to her, as he was about to
+step into the carriage with the Esquarts.
+
+'If you have not better news of your uncle, it must be,' she replied, and
+gave him her hand promptly and formally, hardly diverting her eyes from
+Lady Esquart to grace the temporary gift with a look.  The last of her he
+saw was a waving of her arm and finger pointing triumphantly at the Bell
+in the tower.  It said, to an understanding unpractised in the feminine
+mysteries: 'I can sleep through anything.'  What that revealed of her
+state of conscience and her nature, his efforts to preserve the lovely
+optical figure blocked his guessing.  He was with her friends, who liked
+her the more they knew her, and he was compelled to lean to their view of
+the perplexing woman.
+
+'She is a riddle to the world,' Lady Esquart said, 'but I know that she
+is good.  It is the best of signs when women take to her and are proud to
+be her friend.'
+
+My lord echoed his wife.  She talked in this homely manner to stop any
+notion of philandering that the young gentleman might be disposed to
+entertain in regard to a lady so attractive to the pursuit as Diana's
+beauty and delicate situation might make her seem.
+
+'She is an exceedingly clever person, and handsomer than report, which is
+uncommon,' said Dacier, becoming voluble on town-topics, Miss Asper
+incidentally among them.  He denied Lady Esquart's charge of an
+engagement; the matter hung.
+
+His letters at Lugano summoned him to England instantly.
+
+'I have taken leave of Mrs. Warwick, but tell her I regret, et caetera,'
+he said; 'and by the way, as my uncle's illness appears to be serious,
+the longer she is absent the better, perhaps.'
+
+'It would never do,' said Lady Esquart, understanding his drift
+immediately.  'We winter in Rome.  She will not abandon us--I have her
+word for it.  Next Easter we are in Paris; and so home, I suppose.  There
+will be no hurry before we are due at Cowes.  We seem to have become
+confirmed wanderers; for two of us at least it is likely to be our last
+great tour.'
+
+Dacier informed her that he had pledged his word to write to Mrs. Warwick
+of his uncle's condition, and the several appointed halting-places of the
+Esquarts between the lakes and Florence were named to him.  Thus all
+things were openly treated; all had an air of being on the surface; the
+communications passing between Mrs. Warwick and the Hon. Percy Dacier
+might have been perused by all the world.  None but that portion of it,
+sage in suspiciousness, which objects to such communications under any
+circumstances, could have detected in their correspondence a spark of
+coming fire or that there was common warmth.  She did not feel it, nor
+did he.  The position of the two interdicted it to a couple honourably
+sensible of social decencies; and who were, be it added, kept apart.
+The blood is the treacherous element in the story of the nobly civilized,
+of which secret Diana, a wife and no wife, a prisoner in liberty, a
+blooming woman imagining herself restored to transcendent maiden
+ecstacies--the highest youthful poetic--had received some faint
+intimation when the blush flamed suddenly in her cheeks and her heart
+knelled like the towers of a city given over to the devourer.  She had no
+wish to meet him again.  Without telling herself why, she would have
+shunned the meeting.  Disturbers that thwarted her simple happiness in
+sublime scenery were best avoided.  She thought so the more for a fitful
+blur to the simplicity of her sensations, and a task she sometimes had in
+restoring and toning them, after that sweet morning time in Rovio.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+'THE PRINCESS EGERIA'
+
+London, say what we will of it, is after all the head of the British
+giant, and if not the liveliest in bubbles, it is past competition the
+largest broth-pot of brains anywhere simmering on the hob: over the
+steadiest of furnaces too.  And the oceans and the continents, as you
+know, are perpetual and copious contributors, either to the heating
+apparatus or to the contents of the pot.  Let grander similes besought.
+This one fits for the smoky receptacle cherishing millions, magnetic to
+tens of millions more, with its caked outside of grime, and the inward
+substance incessantly kicking the lid, prankish, but never casting it
+off.  A good stew, you perceive; not a parlous boiling.  Weak as we may
+be in our domestic cookery, our political has been sagaciously adjusted
+as yet to catch the ardours of the furnace without being subject to their
+volcanic activities.
+
+That the social is also somewhat at fault, we have proof in occasional
+outcries over the absence of these or those particular persons famous for
+inspiriting.  It sticks and clogs.  The improvising songster is missed,
+the convivial essayist, the humorous Dean, the travelled cynic, and he,
+the one of his day, the iridescent Irishman, whose remembered repartees
+are a feast, sharp and ringing, at divers tables descending from the
+upper to the fat citizen's, where, instead of coming in the sequence of
+talk, they are exposed by blasting, like fossil teeth of old Deluge
+sharks in monotonous walls of our chalk-quarries.  Nor are these the less
+welcome for the violence of their introduction among a people glad to be
+set burning rather briskly awhile by the most unexpected of digs in the
+ribs.  Dan Merion, to give an example.  That was Dan Merion's joke with
+the watchman: and he said that other thing to the Marquis of Kingsbury,
+when the latter asked him if he had ever won a donkey-race.  And old Dan
+is dead, and we are the duller for it! which leads to the question: Is
+genius hereditary?  And the affirmative and negative are respectively
+maintained, rather against the Yes is the dispute, until a member of the
+audience speaks of Dan Merion's having left a daughter reputed for a
+sparkling wit not much below the level of his own.  Why, are you unaware
+that the Mrs. Warwick of that scandal case of Warwick versus Dannisburgh
+was old Dan Merion's girl--and his only child?  It is true; for a friend
+had it from a man who had it straight from Mr. Braddock, of the firm of
+Braddock, Thorpe and Simnel, her solicitors in the action, who told him
+he could sit listening to her for hours, and that she was as innocent as
+day; a wonderful combination of a good woman and a clever woman and a
+real beauty.  Only her misfortune was to have a furiously jealous
+husband, and they say he went mad after hearing the verdict.
+
+Diana was talked of in the London circles.  A witty woman is such salt
+that where she has once been tasted she must perforce be missed more than
+any of the absent, the dowering heavens not having yet showered her like
+very plentifully upon us.  Then it was first heard that Percy Dacier had
+been travelling with her.  Miss Asper heard of it.  Her uncle, Mr.
+Quintin Manx, the millionnaire, was an acquaintance of the new Judge
+and titled dignitary, Sir Cramborne Wathin, and she visited Lady Wathin,
+at whose table the report in the journals of the Nile-boat party was
+mentioned.  Lady Wathin's table could dispense with witty women, and,
+for that matter, witty men.  The intrusion of the spontaneous on the
+stereotyped would have clashed.  She preferred, as hostess, the old legal
+anecdotes sure of their laugh, and the citations from the manufactories
+of fun in the Press, which were current and instantly intelligible to all
+her guests.  She smiled suavely on an impromptu pun, because her
+experience of the humorous appreciation of it by her guests bade her
+welcome the upstart.  Nothing else impromptu was acceptable.  Mrs.
+Warwick therefore was not missed by Lady Wathin.  'I have met her,' she
+said.  'I confess I am not one of the fanatics about Mrs. Warwick.  She
+has a sort of skill in getting men to clamour.  If you stoop to tickle
+them, they will applaud.  It is a way of winning a reputation.'  When the
+ladies were separated from the gentlemen by the stream of Claret, Miss
+Asper heard Lady Wathin speak of Mrs. Warwick again.  An allusion to Lord
+Dannisburgh's fit of illness in the House of Lords led to her saying that
+there was no doubt he had been fascinated, and that, in her opinion, Mrs.
+Warwick was a dangerous woman.  Sir Cramborne knew something of Mr.
+Warwick; 'Poor man!' she added.  A lady present put a question concerning
+Mrs. Warwick's beauty.  'Yes,' Lady Wathin said, 'she has good looks to
+aid her.  Judging from what I hear and have seen, her thirst is for
+notoriety.  Sooner or later we shall have her making a noise, you may be
+certain.  Yes, she has the secret of dressing well--in the French style.'
+
+A simple newspaper report of the expedition of a Nileboat party could
+stir the Powers to take her up and turn her on their wheel in this
+manner.
+
+But others of the sons and daughters of London were regretting her
+prolonged absence.  The great and exclusive Whitmonby, who had dined once
+at Lady Wathin's table, and vowed never more to repeat that offence to
+his patience, lamented bitterly to Henry Wilmers that the sole woman
+worthy of sitting at a little Sunday evening dinner with the cream of the
+choicest men of the time was away wasting herself in that insane modern
+chase of the picturesque!  He called her a perverted Celimene.
+
+Redworth had less to regret than the rest of her male friends, as he was
+receiving at intervals pleasant descriptive letters, besides manuscript
+sheets of ANTONIA'S new piece of composition, to correct the proofs for
+the press, and he read them critically, he thought.  He read them with a
+watchful eye to guard them from the critics.  ANTONIA, whatever her
+faults as a writer, was not one of the order whose Muse is the Public
+Taste.  She did at least draw her inspiration from herself, and there was
+much to be feared in her work, if a sale was the object.  Otherwise
+Redworth's highly critical perusal led him flatly to admire.  This was
+like her, and that was like her, and here and there a phrase gave him the
+very play of her mouth, the flash of her eyes.  Could he possibly wish,
+or bear, to, have anything altered?  But she had reason to desire an
+extended sale of the work.  Her aim, in the teeth of her independent
+style, was at the means of independence--a feminine method of attempting
+to conciliate contraries; and after despatching the last sheets to the
+printer, he meditated upon the several ways which might serve to, assist
+her; the main way running thus in his mind:--We have a work of genius.
+Genius is good for the public.  What is good for the public should be
+recommended by the critics.  It should be.  How then to come at them to,
+get it done?  As he was not a member of the honourable literary craft,
+and regarded its arcana altogether externally, it may be confessed of him
+that he deemed the Incorruptible corruptible;--not, of course, with
+filthy coin slid into sticky palms.  Critics are human, and exceedingly,
+beyond the common lot, when touched; and they are excited by mysterious
+hints of loftiness in authorship; by rumours of veiled loveliness;
+whispers, of a general anticipation; and also Editors can jog them.
+Redworth was rising to be a Railway King of a period soon to glitter with
+rails, iron in the concrete, golden in the visionary.  He had already his
+Court, much against his will.  The powerful magnetic attractions of those
+who can help the world to fortune, was exercised by him in spite of his
+disgust of sycophants.  He dropped words to right and left of a coming
+work by ANTONIA.  And who was ANTONIA?--Ah! there hung the riddle.--An
+exalted personage?--So much so that he dared not name her even in
+confidence to ladies; he named the publishers.  To men he said he was at
+liberty to speak of her only as the most beautiful woman of her time.
+His courtiers of both sexes were recommended to read the new story, THE
+PRINCESS EGERIA.
+
+Oddly, one great lady of his Court had heard a forthcoming work of this
+title spoken of by Percy Dacier, not a man to read silly fiction, unless
+there was meaning behind the lines: that is, rich scandal of the
+aristocracy, diversified by stinging epigrams to the address of
+discernible personages.  She talked of THE PRINCESS EGERIA: nay, laid her
+finger on the identical Princess.  Others followed her.  Dozens were soon
+flying with the torch: a new work immediately to be published from the
+pen of the Duchess of Stars!--And the Princess who lends her title to the
+book is a living portrait of the Princess of Highest Eminence, the Hope
+of all Civilization.--Orders for copies of THE PRINCESS EGERIA reached
+the astonished publishers before the book was advertized.
+
+Speaking to editors, Redworth complimented them with friendly intimations
+of the real authorship of the remarkable work appearing.  He used a
+certain penetrative mildness of tone in saying that 'he hoped the book
+would succeed': it deserved to; it was original; but the originality
+might tell against it.  All would depend upon a favourable launching of
+such a book.  'Mrs. Warwick?  Mrs. Warwick?' said the most influential of
+editors, Mr. Marcus Tonans; 'what! that singularly handsome woman?  .  .
+The Dannisburgh affair?  .  .  .  She's Whitmonby's heroine.  If she
+writes as cleverly as she talks, her work is worth trumpeting.'  He
+promised to see that it went into good hands for the review, and a prompt
+review--an essential point; none of your long digestions of the contents.
+
+Diana's indefatigable friend had fair assurances that her book would be
+noticed before it dropped dead to the public appetite for novelty.  He
+was anxious next, notwithstanding his admiration of the originality of
+the conception and the cleverness of the writing, lest the Literary
+Reviews should fail 'to do it justice': he used the term; for if they
+wounded her, they would take the pleasure out of success; and he had
+always present to him that picture of the beloved woman kneeling at the
+fire-grate at The Crossways, which made the thought of her suffering any
+wound his personal anguish, so crucially sweet and saintly had her image
+then been stamped on him.  He bethought him, in consequence, while
+sitting in the House of Commons; engaged upon the affairs of the nation,
+and honestly engaged, for he was a vigilant worker--that the Irish
+Secretary, Charles Raiser, with whom he stood in amicable relations,
+had an interest, to the extent of reputed ownership, in the chief of the
+Literary Reviews.  He saw Raiser on the benches, and marked him to speak
+for him.  Looking for him shortly afterward, the man was gone.  'Off to
+the Opera, if he's not too late for the drop,' a neighbour said, smiling
+queerly, as though he ought to know; and then Redworth recollected
+current stories of Raiser's fantastical devotion to the popular prima
+donna of the angelical voice.--He hurried to the Opera and met the vomit,
+and heard in the crushroom how divine she had been that night.  A fellow
+member of the House, tolerably intimate with Raiser, informed him,
+between frightful stomachic roulades of her final aria, of the likeliest
+place where Raiser might be found when the Opera was over: not at his
+Club, nor at his chambers: on one of the bridges--Westminster,
+he fancied.
+
+There was no need for Redworth to run hunting the man at so late an hour,
+but he was drawn on by the similarity in dissimilarity of this devotee of
+a woman, who could worship her at a distance, and talk of her to
+everybody.  Not till he beheld Raiser's tall figure cutting the bridge-
+parapet, with a star over his shoulder, did he reflect on the views the
+other might entertain of the nocturnal solicitation to see 'justice done'
+to a lady's new book in a particular Review, and the absurd outside of
+the request was immediately smothered by the natural simplicity and
+pressing necessity of its inside.
+
+He crossed the road and said, 'Ah?' in recognition.  'Were you at the
+Opera this evening?'
+
+'Oh, just at the end,' said Raiser, pacing forward.  'It's a fine night.
+Did you hear her?'
+
+'No; too late.'
+
+Raiser pressed ahead, to meditate by himself, as was his wont.  Finding
+Redworth beside him, he monologuized in his depths: 'They'll kill her.
+She puts her soul into it, gives her blood.  There 's no failing of the
+voice.  You see how it wears her.  She's doomed.  Half a year's rest on
+Como .  .  .  somewhere .  .  . she might be saved!  She won't refuse to
+work.'
+
+'Have you spoken to her?' said Redworth.
+
+'And next to Berlin!  Vienna!  A horse would be . . . .
+
+I?  I don't know her,' Raiser replied.  'Some of their women stand it.
+She's delicately built.  You can't treat a lute like a drum without
+destroying the instrument.  We look on at a murder!'
+
+The haggard prospect from that step of the climax checked his delivery.
+
+Redworth knew him to be a sober man in office, a man with a head for
+statecraft: he had made a weighty speech in the House a couple of hours
+back.  This Opera cantatrice, no beauty, though gentle, thrilling,
+winning, was his corner of romance.
+
+'Do you come here often?' he asked.
+
+'Yes, I can't sleep.'
+
+'London at night, from the bridge, looks fine.  By the way .  .  .'
+
+'It 's lonely here, that's the advantage,' said Rainer; 'I keep silver in
+my pocket for poor girls going to their homes, and I'm left in peace.  An
+hour later, there's the dawn down yonder.'
+
+'By the way,' Redworth interposed, and was told that after these nights
+of her singing she never slept till morning.  He swallowed the fact,
+sympathized, and resumed: 'I want a small favour.'
+
+'No business here, please!'
+
+'Not a bit of it.  You know Mrs. Warwick.  .  .  .  You know of her.
+She 's publishing a book.  I want you to use your influence to get it
+noticed quickly, if you can.'
+
+'Warwick?  Oh, yes, a handsome woman.  Ah, yes; the Dannisburgh affair,
+yes.  What did I hear!--They say she 's thick with Percy Dacier at
+present.  Who was talking of her!  Yes, old Lady Dacier.  So she 's a
+friend of yours?'
+
+'She's an old friend,' said Redworth, composing himself; for the dose he
+had taken was not of the sweetest, and no protestations could be uttered
+by a man of the world to repel a charge of tattlers.  'The truth is, her
+book is clever.  I have read the proofs.  She must have an income, and
+she won't apply to her husband, and literature should help her, if she 's
+fairly treated.  She 's Irish by descent; Merion's daughter, witty as her
+father.  It's odd you haven't met her.  The mere writing of the book is
+extraordinarily good.  If it 's put into capable hands for review!
+that's all it requires.  And full of life .  .  .  bright dialogue .  .
+capital sketches.  The book's a piece of literature.  Only it must have
+competent critics!'
+
+So he talked while Rainer ejaculated: 'Warwick?  Warwick?' in the
+irritating tone of dozens of others.  'What did I hear of her husband?
+He has a post .  .  .  .  Yes, yes.  Some one said the verdict in that
+case knocked him over--heart disease, or something.'
+
+He glanced at the dark Thames water.  'Take my word for it, the groves of
+Academe won't compare with one of our bridges at night, if you seek
+philosophy.  You see the London above and the London below: round us the
+sleepy city, and the stars in the water looking like souls of suicides.
+I caught a girl with a bad fit on her once.  I had to lecture her!
+It's when we become parsons we find out our cousinship with these poor
+peripatetics, whose "last philosophy" is a jump across the parapet.  The
+bridge at night is a bath for a public man.  But choose another; leave me
+mine.'
+
+Redworth took the hint.  He stated the title of Mrs. Warwick's book, and
+imagined from the thoughtful cast of Rainer's head, that he was
+impressing THE PRINCESS EGERIA On his memory.
+
+Rainer burst out, with clenched fists: 'He beats her!  The fellow lives
+on her and beats her; strikes that woman!  He drags her about to every
+Capital in Europe to make money for him, and the scoundrel pays her with
+blows.'
+
+In the course of a heavy tirade against the scoundrel, Redworth
+apprehended that it was the cantatrice's husband.  He expressed his
+horror and regret; paused, and named THE PRINCESS EGERIA and a certain
+Critical Review.  Another outburst seemed to be in preparation.  Nothing
+further was to be done for the book at that hour.  So, with a blunt 'Good
+night,' he left Charles Rainer pacing, and thought on his walk home of
+the strange effects wrought by women unwittingly upon men (Englishmen);
+those women, or some of them, as little knowing it as the moon her
+traditional influence upon the tides.  He thought of Percy Dacier too.
+In his bed he could have wished himself peregrinating a bridge.
+
+The PRINCESS EGERIA appeared, with the reviews at her heels, a pack of
+clappers, causing her to fly over editions clean as a doe the gates and
+hedges--to quote Mr. Sullivan Smith, who knew not a sentence of the work
+save what he gathered of it from Redworth, at their chance meeting on
+Piccadilly pavement, and then immediately he knew enough to blow his
+huntsman's horn in honour of the sale.  His hallali rang high.  'Here's
+another Irish girl to win their laurels!  'Tis one of the blazing
+successes.  A most enthralling work, beautifully composed.  And where is
+she now, Mr. Redworth, since she broke away from that husband of hers,
+that wears the clothes of the worst tailor ever begotten by a thread
+on a needle, as I tell every soul of 'em in my part of the country?'
+
+'You have seen him?' said Redworth.
+
+'Why, sir, wasn't he on show at the Court he applied to for relief and
+damages?  as we heard when we were watching the case daily, scarce
+drawing our breath for fear the innocent--and one of our own blood, would
+be crushed.  Sure, there he stood; ay, and looking the very donkey for a
+woman to flip off her fingers, like the dust from my great uncle's prise
+of snuff!  She's a glory to the old country.  And better you than
+another, I'd say, since it wasn't an Irishman to have her: but what
+induced the dear lady to take him, is the question we 're all of us
+asking!  And it's mournful to think that somehow you contrive to get the
+pick of us in the girls!  If ever we 're united, 'twill be by a trick of
+circumvention of that sort, pretty sure.  There's a turn in the market
+when they shut their eyes and drop to the handiest: and London's a vortex
+that poor dear dull old Dublin can't compete with.  I 'll beg you for the
+address of the lady her friend, Lady Dunstane.'
+
+Mr. Sullivan Smith walked with Redworth through the park to the House of
+Commons, discoursing of Rails and his excellent old friend's rise to the
+top rung of the ladder and Beanstalk land, so elevated that one had to
+look up at him with watery eyes, as if one had flung a ball at the
+meridian sun.  Arrived at famed St. Stephen's, he sent in his compliments
+to the noble patriot and accepted an invitation to dinner.
+
+'And mind you read THE PRINCESS EGERIA,' said Redworth.
+
+'Again and again, my friend.  The book is bought.'  Sullivan Smith
+slapped his breastpocket.
+
+'There's a bit of Erin in it.'
+
+'It sprouts from Erin.'
+
+'Trumpet it.'
+
+'Loud as cavalry to the charge!'
+
+Once with the title stamped on his memory, the zealous Irishman might be
+trusted to become an ambulant advertizer.  Others, personal friends,
+adherents, courtiers of Redworth's, were active.  Lady Pennon and Henry
+Wilmers, in the upper circle; Whitmonby and Westlake, in the literary;
+spread the fever for this new book.  The chief interpreter of public
+opinion caught the way of the wind and headed the gale.
+
+Editions of the book did really run like fires in summer furze; and to
+such an extent that a simple literary performance grew to be respected in
+Great Britain, as representing Money.
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+
+
+A kindly sense of superiority
+By resisting, I made him a tyrant
+Carry explosives and must particularly guard against sparks
+Depending for dialogue upon perpetual fresh supplies of scandal
+Dose he had taken was not of the sweetest
+Friendship, I fancy, means one heart between two
+He was the maddest of tyrants--a weak one
+He, by insisting, made me a rebel
+Her feelings--trustier guides than her judgement in this crisis
+I do not see it, because I will not see it
+Inducement to act the hypocrite before the hypocrite world
+Insistency upon there being two sides to a case--to every case
+Intrusion of the spontaneous on the stereotyped would clash
+Irony that seemed to spring from aversion
+It is the best of signs when women take to her
+Mistaking of her desires for her reasons
+Mutual deference
+Never fell far short of outstripping the sturdy pedestrian Time
+Observation is the most, enduring of the pleasures of life
+One might build up a respectable figure in negatives
+Openly treated; all had an air of being on the surface
+Owner of such a woman, and to lose her!
+Paint themselves pure white, to the obliteration of minor spots
+Quixottry is agreeable reading, a silly performance
+Real happiness is a state of dulness
+Reluctant to take the life of flowers for a whim
+Rewards, together with the expectations, of the virtuous
+Sleepless night
+Smoky receptacle cherishing millions
+Terrible decree, that all must act who would prevail
+Vowed never more to repeat that offence to his patience
+Was not one of the order whose Muse is the Public Taste
+Wife and no wife, a prisoner in liberty
+Women are taken to be the second thoughts of the Creator
+World is ruthless, dear friends, because the world is hypocrite
+World prefers decorum to honesty
+Yawns coming alarmingly fast, in the place of ideas
+
+
+
+
+[The End]
+
+
+
+
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+
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