6 files changed, 7493 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/.gitattributes b/.gitattributes
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6833f05
--- /dev/null
+++ b/.gitattributes
@@ -0,0 +1,3 @@
+* text=auto
+*.txt text
+*.md text
diff --git a/4468-0.txt b/4468-0.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..704b89a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/4468-0.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,3538 @@
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 4468 ***
+
+DIANA OF THE CROSSWAYS
+
+By George Meredith
+
+1897
+
+
+
+BOOK 4.
+
+XXVII.    CONTAINS MATTER FOR SUBSEQUENT EXPLOSION
+XXVIII.   DIALOGUE ROUND THE SUBJECT OF A PORTRAIT, WITH SOME INDICATIONS
+          OF THE TASK FOR DIANA
+XXIX.     SHOWS THE APPROACHES OF THE POLITICAL AND THE DOMESTIC CRISIS
+          IN COMPANY
+XXX.      IN WHICH THERE IS A TASTE OF A LITTLE DINNER AND AN AFTERTASTE
+XXXI.     A CHAPTER CONTAINING GREAT POLITICAL NEWS AND THEREWITH AN
+          INTRUSION OF THE LOVE-GOD
+XXXII.    WHEREIN WE BEHOLD A GIDDY TURN AT THE SPECTRAL CROSSWAYS
+XXXIII.   EXHIBITS THE SPRINGING OF A MINE IN A NEWSPAPER ARTICLE
+XXXIV.    IN WHICH IT IS DARKLY SEEN HOW THE CRIMINAL'S JUDGE MAY BE
+          LOVE'S CRIMINAL
+XXXV.     REVEALS HOW THE TRUE HEROINE OF ROMANCE COMES FINALLY TO HER
+          TIME OF TRIUMPH
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII
+
+CONTAINS MATTER FOR SUBSEQUENT EXPLOSION
+
+Among the various letters inundating Sir Lukin Dunstane upon the report
+of the triumph of surgical skill achieved by Sir William Macpherson and
+Mr. Lanyan Thomson, was one from Lady Wathin, dated Adlands, an estate of
+Mr. Quintin Manx's in Warwickshire, petitioning for the shortest line of
+reassurance as to the condition of her dear cousin, and an intimation of
+the period when it might be deemed possible for a relative to call and
+offer her sincere congratulations: a letter deserving a personal reply,
+one would suppose.  She received the following, in a succinct female hand
+corresponding to its terseness; every 't' righteously crossed, every 'i'
+punctiliously dotted, as she remarked to Constance Asper, to whom the
+communication was transferred for perusal:
+
+     'DEAR LADY WATHIN,--Lady Dunstane is gaining strength.  The measure
+     of her pulse indicates favourably.  She shall be informed in good
+     time of your solicitude for her recovery.  The day cannot yet be
+     named for visits of any kind.  You will receive information as soon
+     as the house is open.
+
+     'I have undertaken the task of correspondence, and beg you to
+     believe me,
+
+                         'Very truly yours,
+                                             'D.  A.  WARWICK.'
+
+Miss Asper speculated on the handwriting of her rival.  She obtained
+permission to keep the letter, with the intention of transmitting it per
+post to an advertising interpreter of character in caligraphy.
+
+Such was the character of the fair young heiress, exhibited by her
+performances much more patently than the run of a quill would reveal it.
+
+She said, 'It is rather a pretty hand, I think.'
+
+'Mrs. Warwick is a practised writer,' said Lady Wathin.  'Writing is her
+profession, if she has any.  She goes to nurse my cousin.  Her husband
+says she is an excellent nurse.  He says what he can for her.  But you
+must be in the last extremity, or she is ice.  His appeal to her has been
+totally disregarded.  Until he drops down in the street, as his doctor
+expects him to do some day, she will continue her course; and even
+then .  .  .'  An adventuress desiring her freedom!  Lady Wathin looked.
+She was too devout a woman to say what she thought.  But she knew the
+world to be very wicked.  Of Mrs. Warwick, her opinion was formed.  She
+would not have charged the individual creature with a criminal design;
+all she did was to stuff the person her virtue abhorred with the
+wickedness of the world, and that is a common process in antipathy.
+
+She sympathized, moreover, with the beautiful devotedness of the wealthy
+heiress to her ideal of man.  It had led her to make the acquaintance of
+old Lady Dacier, at the house in town, where Constance Asper had first
+met Percy; Mrs. Grafton Winstanley's house, representing neutral
+territory or debateable land for the occasional intercourse of the upper
+class and the climbing in the professions or in commerce; Mrs. Grafton
+Winstanley being on the edge of aristocracy by birth, her husband, like
+Mr. Quintin Manx, a lord of fleets.  Old Lady Dacier's bluntness in
+speaking of her grandson would have shocked Lady Wathin as much as it
+astonished, had she been less of an ardent absorber of aristocratic
+manners.  Percy was plainly called a donkey, for hanging off and on with
+a handsome girl of such expectations as Miss Asper.  'But what you can't
+do with a horse, you can't hope to do with a donkey.'  She added that she
+had come for the purpose of seeing the heiress, of whose points of person
+she delivered a judgement critically appreciative as a horsefancier's on
+the racing turf.  'If a girl like that holds to it, she's pretty sure to
+get him at last.  It 's no use to pull his neck down to the water.'
+
+Lady Wathin delicately alluded to rumours of an entanglement, an
+admiration he had, ahem.
+
+'A married woman,' the veteran nodded.  'I thought that was off?  She
+must be a clever intriguer to keep him so long.'
+
+'She is undoubtedly clever,' said Lady Wathin, and it was mumbled in her
+hearing: 'The woman seems to have a taste for our family.'
+
+They agreed that they could see nothing to be done.  The young lady must
+wither, Mrs. Warwick have her day.  The veteran confided her experienced
+why to Lady Wathin: 'All the tales you tell of a woman of that sort are
+sharp sauce to the palates of men.'
+
+They might be, to the men of the dreadful gilded idle class!
+
+Mrs. Warwick's day appeared indefinitely prolonged, judging by Percy
+Dacier's behaviour to Miss Asper.  Lady Wathin watched them narrowly when
+she had the chance, a little ashamed of her sex, or indignant rather at
+his display of courtliness in exchange for her open betrayal of her
+preference.  It was almost to be wished that she would punish him by
+sacrificing herself to one of her many brilliant proposals of marriage.
+But such are women!--precisely because of his holding back he tightened
+the cord attaching him to her tenacious heart.  This was the truth.  For
+the rest, he was gracefully courteous; an observer could perceive the
+charm he exercised.  He talked with a ready affability, latterly with
+greater social ease; evidently not acting the indifferent conqueror, or
+so consummately acting it as to mask the air.  And yet he was ambitious,
+and he was not rich.  Notoriously was he ambitious, and with wealth to
+back him, a great entertaining house, troops of adherents, he would
+gather influence, be propelled to leadership.  The vexation of a constant
+itch to speak to him on the subject, and the recognition, that he knew it
+all as well as she, tormented Lady Wathin.  He gave her comforting news
+of her dear cousin in the Winter.
+
+'You have heard from Mrs. Warwick?' she said.
+
+He replied, 'I had the latest from Mr. Redworth.'
+
+'Mrs. Warwick has relinquished her post?'
+
+'When she does, you may be sure that Lady Dunstane is, perfectly
+reestablished.'
+
+'She is an excellent nurse.'
+
+'The best, I believe.'
+
+'It is a good quality in sickness.'
+
+'Proof of good all through.'
+
+'Her husband might have the advantage of it.  His state is really
+pathetic.  If she has feeling, and could only be made aware, she might
+perhaps be persuaded to pass from the friendly to the wifely duty.'
+
+Mr. Dacier bent his head to listen, and he bowed.
+
+He was fast in the toils; and though we have assurance that evil cannot
+triumph in perpetuity, the aspect of it throning provokes a kind of
+despair.  How strange if ultimately the lawyers once busy about the uncle
+were to take up the case of the nephew, and this time reverse the issue,
+by proving it!  For poor Mr. Warwick was emphatic on the question of his
+honour.  It excited him dangerously.  He was long-suffering, but with the
+slightest clue terrible.  The unknotting of the entanglement might thus
+happen--and Constance Asper would welcome her hero still.
+
+Meanwhile there was actually nothing to be done: a deplorable absence of
+motive villainy; apparently an absence of the beneficent Power directing
+events to their proper termination.  Lady Wathin heard of her cousin's
+having been removed to Cowes in May, for light Solent and Channel voyages
+on board Lord Esquart's yacht.  She heard also of heavy failures and
+convulsions in the City of London, quite unconscious that the Fates, or
+agents of the Providence she invoked to precipitate the catastrophe, were
+then beginning cavernously their performance of the part of villain in
+Diana's history.
+
+Diana and Emma enjoyed happy quiet sailings under May breezes on the
+many-coloured South-western waters, heart in heart again; the physical
+weakness of the one, the moral weakness of the other, creating that
+mutual dependency which makes friendship a pulsating tie.  Diana's
+confession had come of her letter to Emma.  When the latter was able to
+examine her correspondence, Diana brought her the heap for perusal, her
+own sealed scribble, throbbing with all the fatal might-have-been, under
+her eyes.  She could have concealed and destroyed it.  She sat beside her
+friend, awaiting her turn, hearing her say at the superscription: 'Your
+writing, Tony?' and she nodded.  She was asked: 'Shall I read it?' She
+answered: 'Read.'  They were soon locked in an embrace.  Emma had no
+perception of coldness through those brief dry lines; her thought was of
+the matter.
+
+'The danger is over now?' she said.
+
+'Yes, that danger is over now.'
+
+'You have weathered it?'
+
+'I love him.'
+
+Emma dropped a heavy sigh in pity of her, remotely in compassion for
+Redworth, the loving and unbeloved.  She was too humane and wise of our
+nature to chide her Tony for having her sex's heart.  She had charity to
+bestow on women; in defence of them against men and the world, it was a
+charity armed with the weapons of battle.  The wife madly stripped before
+the world by a jealous husband, and left chained to the rock, her youth
+wasting, her blood arrested, her sensibilities chilled and assailing her
+under their multitudinous disguises, and for whom the world is merciless,
+called forth Emma's tenderest commiseration; and that wife being Tony,
+and stricken with the curse of love, in other circumstances the blessing,
+Emma bled for her.
+
+'But nothing desperate?' she said.
+
+'No; you have saved me.'
+
+'I would knock at death's doors again, and pass them, to be sure of
+that.'
+
+'Kiss me; you may be sure.  I would not put my lips to your cheek if
+there were danger of my faltering.'
+
+'But you love him.'
+
+'I do: and because I love him I will not let him be fettered to me.'
+
+'You will see him.'
+
+'Do not imagine that his persuasions undermined your Tony.  I am subject
+to panics.'
+
+'Was it your husband?'
+
+'I had a visit from Lady Wathin.  She knows him.  She came as peacemaker.
+She managed to hint at his authority.  Then came a letter from him--of
+supplication, interpenetrated with the hint: a suffused atmosphere.  Upon
+that; unexpected by me, my--let me call him so once, forgive me!--lover
+came.  Oh! he loves me, or did then.  Percy!  He had been told that I
+should be claimed.  I felt myself the creature I am--a wreck of marriage.
+But I fancied I could serve him:--I saw golden.  My vanity was the chief
+traitor.  Cowardice of course played a part.  In few things that we do,
+where self is concerned, will cowardice not be found.  And the
+hallucination colours it to seem a lovely heroism.  That was the second
+time Mr. Redworth arrived.  I am always at crossways, and he rescues me;
+on this occasion unknowingly.'
+
+'There's a divinity .  .  .'  said Emma.  ' When I think of it I perceive
+that Patience is our beneficent fairy godmother, who brings us our
+harvest in the long result.'
+
+'My dear, does she bring us our labourers' rations, to sustain us for the
+day?' said Diana.'
+
+'Poor fare, but enough.'
+
+'I fear I was born godmotherless.'
+
+'You have stores of patience, Tony; only now and then fits of
+desperation.'
+
+'My nature's frailty, the gap in it: we will give it no fine names
+--they cover our pitfalls.  I am open to be carried on a tide of
+unreasonableness when the coward cries out.  But I can say, dear, that
+after one rescue, a similar temptation is unlikely to master me.  I do
+not subscribe to the world's decrees for love of the monster, though I am
+beginning to understand the dues of allegiance.  We have ceased to write
+letters.  You may have faith in me.'
+
+'I have, with my whole soul,' said Emma.
+
+So the confession closed; and in the present instance there were not any
+forgotten chambers to be unlocked and ransacked for addenda confessions.
+
+The subjects discoursed of by the two endeared the hours to them.  They
+were aware that the English of the period would have laughed a couple of
+women to scorn for venturing on them, and they were not a little hostile
+in consequence, and shot their epigrams profusely, applauding the keener
+that appeared to score the giant bulk of their intolerant enemy, who
+holds the day, but not the morrow.  Us too he holds for the day, to
+punish us if we have temporal cravings.  He scatters his gifts to the
+abject; tossing to us rebels bare dog-biscuit.  But the life of the
+spirit is beyond his region; we have our morrow in his day when we crave
+nought of him.  Diana and Emma delighted to discover that they were each
+the rebel of their earlier and less experienced years; each a member of
+the malcontent minor faction, the salt of earth, to whom their salt must
+serve for nourishment, as they admitted, relishing it determinedly, not
+without gratification.
+
+Sir Lukin was busy upon his estate in Scotland.  They summoned young
+Arthur Rhodes to the island, that he might have a taste of the new
+scenes.  Diana was always wishing for his instruction and refreshment;
+and Redworth came to spend a Saturday and Sunday with them, and showed
+his disgust of the idle boy, as usual, at the same time consulting them
+on the topic of furniture for the Berkshire mansion he had recently
+bought, rather vaunting the Spanish pictures his commissioner in Madrid
+was transmitting.  The pair of rebels, vexed by his treatment of the
+respectful junior, took him for an incarnation of their enemy, and pecked
+and worried the man astonishingly.  He submitted to it like the placable
+giant.  Yes, he was a Liberal, and furnishing and decorating the house in
+the stability of which he trusted.  Why not?  We must accept the world as
+it is, try to improve it by degrees.--Not so: humanity will not wait for
+you, the victims are shrieking beneath the bricks of your enormous
+edifice, behind the canvas of your pictures.  'But you may really say
+that luxurious yachting is an odd kind of insurgency,' avowed Diana.
+'It's the tangle we are in.'
+
+'It's the coat we have to wear; and why fret at it for being
+comfortable?'
+
+'I don't half enough, when I think of my shivering neighbours.'
+
+'Money is of course a rough test of virtue,' said Redworth.  'We have no
+other general test.'
+
+Money!  The ladies proclaimed it a mere material test; Diana, gazing on
+sunny sea, with an especial disdain.  And name us your sort of virtue.
+There is more virtue in poverty, He denied that.  Inflexibly British, he
+declared money, and also the art of getting money, to be hereditary
+virtues, deserving of their reward.  The reward a superior wealth and its
+fruits?  Yes, the power to enjoy and spread enjoyment: and let idleness
+envy both!  He abused idleness, and by implication the dilettante
+insurgency fostering it.  However, he was compensatingly heterodox in his
+view of the Law's persecution of women; their pertinacious harpings on
+the theme had brought him to that; and in consideration of the fact, as
+they looked from yacht to shore, of their being rebels participating
+largely in the pleasures of the tyrant's court, they allowed him to
+silence them, and forgave him.
+
+Thoughts upon money and idleness were in confusion with Diana.  She had a
+household to support in London, and she was not working; she could not
+touch THE CANTATRICE while Emma was near.  Possibly, she again
+ejaculated, the Redworths of the world were right: the fruitful labours
+were with the mattock and hoe, or the mind directing them.  It was a
+crushing invasion of materialism, so she proposed a sail to the coast of
+France, and thither they flew, touching Cherbourg, Alderney, Sark,
+Guernsey, and sighting the low Brittany rocks.  Memorable days to Arthur
+Rhodes.  He saw perpetually the one golden centre in new scenes.  He
+heard her voice, he treasured her sayings; her gestures, her play of lip
+and eyelid, her lift of head, lightest movements, were imprinted on him,
+surely as the heavens are mirrored in the quiet seas, firmly and richly
+as earth answers to the sprinkled grain.  For he was blissfully athirst,
+untroubled by a hope.  She gave him more than she knew of: a present that
+kept its beating heart into the future; a height of sky, a belief in
+nobility, permanent through manhood down to age.  She was his foam-born
+Goddess of those leaping waters; differently hued, crescented,
+a different influence.  He had a happy week, and it charmed Diana to hear
+him tell her so.  In spite of Redworth, she had faith in the fruit-
+bearing powers of a time of simple happiness, and shared the youth's in
+reflecting it.  Only the happiness must be simple, that of the glass to
+the lovely face: no straining of arms to retain, no heaving of the bosom
+in vacancy.
+
+His poverty and capacity for pure enjoyment led her to think of him
+almost clingingly when hard news reached her from the quaint old City of
+London, which despises poverty and authorcraft and all mean adventurers,
+and bows to the lordly merchant, the mighty financier, Redworth's
+incarnation of the virtues.  Happy days on board the yacht Clarissa!
+Diana had to recall them with effort.  They who sow their money for a
+promising high percentage have built their habitations on the sides of
+the most eruptive mountain in Europe.  AEtna supplies more certain
+harvests, wrecks fewer vineyards and peaceful dwellings.  The greed of
+gain is our volcano.  Her wonder leapt up at the slight inducement she
+had received to embark her money in this Company: a South-American mine,
+collapsed almost within hearing of the trumpets of prospectus, after two
+punctual payments of the half-yearly interest.  A Mrs. Ferdinand Cherson,
+an elder sister of the pretty Mrs. Fryar-Gunnett, had talked to her of
+the cost of things one afternoon at Lady Singleby's garden-party, and
+spoken of the City as the place to help to swell an income, if only you
+have an acquaintance with some of the chief City men.  The great mine was
+named, and the rush for allotments.  She knew a couple of the Directors.
+They vowed to her that ten per cent. was a trifle; the fortune to be
+expected out of the mine was already clearly estimable at forties and
+fifties.  For their part they anticipated cent. per cent.  Mrs. Cherson
+said she wanted money, and had therefore invested in the mine.  It seemed
+so consequent, the cost of things being enormous!  She and her sister
+Mrs. Fryar-Gunnett owned husbands who did their bidding, because of their
+having the brains, it might be understood.  Thus five thousand pounds
+invested would speedily bring five thousand pounds per annum.  Diana had
+often dreamed of the City of London as the seat of magic; and taking the
+City's contempt for authorcraft and the intangible as, from its point of
+view, justly founded, she had mixed her dream strangely with an ancient
+notion of the City's probity.  Her broker's shaking head did not damp her
+ardour for shares to the full amount of her ability to purchase.  She
+remembered her satisfaction at the allotment; the golden castle shot up
+from this fountain mine.  She had a frenzy for mines and fished in some
+English with smaller sums.  'I am now a miner,' she had exclaimed,
+between dismay at her audacity and the pride of it.  Why had she not
+consulted Redworth?  He would peremptorily have stopped the frenzy in its
+first intoxicating effervescence.  She, like Mrs. Cherson, like all women
+who have plunged upon the cost of things, wanted money.  She naturally
+went to the mine.  Address him for counsel in the person of dupe, she
+could not; shame was a barrier.  Could she tell him that the prattle of
+a woman, spendthrift as Mrs. Cherson, had induced her to risk her money?
+Latterly the reports of Mrs. Fryar-Gunnett were not of the flavour to
+make association of their names agreeable to his hearing.
+
+She had to sit down in the buzz of her self-reproaches and amazement at
+the behaviour of that reputable City, shrug, and recommence the labour of
+her pen.  Material misfortune had this one advantage; it kept her from
+speculative thoughts of her lover, and the meaning of his absence and,
+silence.
+
+Diana's perusal of the incomplete CANTATRICE was done with the cold
+critical eye interpreting for the public.  She was forced to write on
+nevertheless, and exactly in the ruts of the foregoing matter.  It
+propelled her.  No longer perversely, of necessity she wrote her best,
+convinced that the work was doomed to unpopularity, resolved that it
+should be at least a victory in style.  A fit of angry cynicism now and
+then set her composing phrases as baits for the critics to quote,
+condemnatory of the attractiveness of the work.  Her mood was bad.  In
+addition, she found Whitmonby cool; he complained of the coolness of her
+letter of adieu; complained of her leaving London so long.  How could she
+expect to be his Queen of the London Salon if she lost touch of the
+topics?  He made no other allusion.  They were soon on amicable terms, at
+the expense of flattering arts that she had not hitherto practised.  But
+Westlake revealed unimagined marvels of the odd corners of the masculine
+bosom.  He was the man of her circle the neatest in epigram, the widest
+of survey, an Oriental traveller, a distinguished writer, and if not
+personally bewitching, remarkably a gentleman of the world.  He was
+wounded; he said as much.  It came to this: admitting that he had no
+claims, he declared it to be unbearable for him to see another preferred.
+The happier was unmentioned, and Diana scraped his wound by rallying him.
+He repeated that he asked only to stand on equal terms with the others;
+her preference of one was past his tolerance.  She told him that since
+leaving Lady Dunstane she had seen but Whitmonby, Wilmers, and him.  He
+smiled sarcastically, saying he had never had a letter from her, except
+the formal one of invitation.
+
+'Powers of blarney, have you forsaken a daughter of Erin?' cried Diana.
+'Here is a friend who has a craving for you, and I talk sense to him.  I
+have written to none of my set since I last left London.'
+
+She pacified him by doses of cajolery new to her tongue.  She liked him,
+abhorred the thought of losing any of her friends, so the cajoling
+sentences ran until Westlake betrayed an inflammable composition,
+and had to be put out, and smoked sullenly.  Her resources were tried
+in restoring him to reason.  The months of absence from London appeared
+to have transformed her world.  Tonans was moderate.  The great editor
+rebuked her for her prolonged absence from London, not so much because it
+discrowned her as Queen of the Salon, but candidly for its rendering her
+service less to him.  Everything she knew of men and affairs was to him
+stale.
+
+'How do you get to the secrets?' she asked.
+
+'By sticking to the centre of them,' he said.
+
+'But how do you manage to be in advance and act the prophet?'
+
+'Because I will have them at any price, and that is known.'
+
+She hinted at the peccant City Company.
+
+'I think I have checked the mining mania, as I did the railway,' said he;
+'and so far it was a public service.  There's no checking of maniacs.'
+
+She took her whipping within and without.  'On another occasion I shall
+apply to you, Mr. Tonans.'
+
+'Ah, there was a time when you could have been a treasure to me,' he
+rejoined; alluding of course to the Dannisburgh days.
+
+In dejection, as she mused on those days, and on her foolish ambition
+to have a London house where her light might burn, she advised herself,
+with Redworth's voice, to quit the house, arrest expenditure, and try
+for happiness by burning and shining in the spirit: devoting herself,
+as Arthur Rhodes did, purely to literature.  It became almost a decision.
+
+Percy she had still neither written to nor heard from, and she dared not
+hope to meet him.  She fancied a wish to have tidings of his marriage: it
+would be peace; if in desolation.  Now that she had confessed and given
+her pledge to Emma, she had so far broken with him as to render the
+holding him chained a cruelty, and his reserve whispered of a rational
+acceptance of the end between them.  She thanked him for it; an act
+whereby she was: instantly melted to such softness that a dread of him
+haunted her.  Coward, take up your burden for armour! she called to her
+poor dungeoned self wailing to have common nourishment.  She knew how
+prodigiously it waxed on crumbs; nay, on the imagination of small
+morsels.  By way of chastizing it, she reviewed her life, her behaviour
+to her husband, until she sank backward to a depth deprived of air and
+light.  That life with her husband was a dungeon to her nature deeper
+than any imposed by present conditions.  She was then a revolutionary to
+reach to the breath of day.  She had now to be, only not a coward, and
+she could breathe as others did.  'Women who sap the moral laws pull down
+the pillars of the temple on their sex,' Emma had said.  Diana perceived
+something of her personal debt to civilization.  Her struggles passed
+into the doomed CANTATRICE occupying days and nights under pressure for
+immediate payment; the silencing of friend Debit, ridiculously calling
+himself Credit, in contempt of sex and conduct, on the ground, that he
+was he solely by virtue of being she.  He had got a trick of singing
+operatic solos in the form and style of the delightful tenor Tellio, and
+they were touching in absurdity, most real in unreality.  Exquisitely
+trilled, after Tellio's manner,
+
+                   'The tradesmen all beseech ye,
+                    The landlord, cook and maid,
+                    Complete THE CANTATRICE,
+                    That they may soon be paid.'
+
+provoked her to laughter in pathos.  He approached, posturing himself
+operatically, with perpetual new verses, rhymes to Danvers, rhymes to
+Madame Sybille, the cook.  Seeing Tellio at one of Henry Wilmers' private
+concerts, Diana's lips twitched to dimples at the likeness her familiar
+had assumed.  She had to compose her countenance to talk to him;
+but the moment of song was the trial.  Lady Singleby sat beside her,
+and remarked:
+
+'You have always fun going on in you!' She partook of the general
+impression that Diana Warwick was too humorous to nurse a downright
+passion.
+
+Before leaving, she engaged Diana to her annual garden-party of the
+closing season, and there the meeting with Percy occurred, not
+unobserved.  Had they been overheard, very little to implicate them
+would have been gathered.  He walked in full view across the lawn
+to her, and they presented mask to mask.
+
+'The beauty of the day tempts you at last, Mrs. Warwick.'
+
+'I have been finishing a piece of work.'
+
+Lovely weather, beautiful dresses: agreed.  Diana wore a yellow robe
+with a black bonnet, and he commented on the becoming hues; for the first
+time, he noticed her dress!  Lovely women?  Dacier hesitated.  One he
+saw.  But surely he must admire Mrs. Fryar-Gunnett?  And who steps beside
+her, transparently fascinated, with visage at three-quarters to the rays
+within her bonnet?  Can it be Sir Lukin Dunstane? and beholding none but
+his charmer!
+
+Dacier withdrew his eyes thoughtfully from the spectacle, and moved to
+woo Diana to a stroll.  She could not restrain her feet; she was out of
+the ring of her courtiers for the moment.  He had seized his opportunity.
+
+'It is nearly a year!' he said.
+
+'I have been nursing nearly all the time, doing the work I do best.'
+
+'Unaltered?'
+
+'A year must leave its marks.'
+
+'Tony!'
+
+'You speak of a madwoman, a good eleven months dead.  Let her rest.
+Those are the conditions.'
+
+'Accepted, if I may see her.'
+
+'Honestly accepted?'
+
+'Imposed fatally, I have to own.  I have felt with you: you are the
+wiser.  But, admitting that, surely we can meet.  I may see you?'
+
+'My house has not been shut.'
+
+'I respected the house.  I distrusted myself.'
+
+'What restores your confidence?'
+
+'The strength I draw from you.'
+
+One of the Beauties at a garden-party is lucky to get as many minutes as
+had passed in quietness.  Diana was met and captured.  But those last
+words of Percy's renewed her pride in him by suddenly building a firm
+faith in herself.  Noblest of lovers!  she thought, and brooded on the
+little that had been spoken, the much conveyed, for a proof of perfect
+truthfulness.
+
+The world had watched them.  It pronounced them discreet if culpable;
+probably cold to the passion both.  Of Dacier's coldness it had no doubt,
+and Diana's was presumed from her comical flights of speech.  She was
+given to him because of the known failure of her other adorers.  He in
+the front rank of politicians attracted her with the lustre of his
+ambition; she him with her mingling of talent and beauty.  An astute
+world; right in the main, owing to perceptions based upon brute nature;
+utterly astray in particulars, for the reason that it takes no count of
+the soul of man or woman.  Hence its glee at a catastrophe; its poor
+stock of mercy.  And when no catastrophe follows, the prophet, for the
+honour of the profession, must decry her as cunning beyond aught yet
+revealed of a serpent sex.
+
+Save for a word or two, the watchman might have overheard and trumpeted
+his report of their interview at Diana's house.  After the first pained
+breathing, when they found themselves alone in that room where they had
+plighted their fortunes, they talked allusively to define the terms
+imposed on them by Reason.  The thwarted step was unmentioned; it was a
+past madness.  But Wisdom being recognized, they could meet.  It would be
+hard if that were denied!  They talked very little of their position;
+both understood the mutual acceptance of it; and now that he had seen her
+and was again under the spell, Dacier's rational mind, together with his
+delight in her presence, compelled him honourably to bow to the terms.
+Only, as these were severe upon lovers, the innocence of their meetings
+demanded indemnification in frequency.
+
+'Come whenever you think I can be useful,' said Diana.
+
+They pressed hands at parting, firmly and briefly, not for the ordinary
+dactylology of lovers, but in sign of the treaty of amity.
+
+She soon learnt that she had tied herself to her costly household.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVIII
+
+DIALOGUE ROUND THE SUBJECT OF A PORTRAIT, WITH SOME INDICATIONS OF THE
+TASK FOR DIANA
+
+An enamoured Egeria who is not a princess in her worldly state nor a
+goddess by origin has to play one of those parts which strain the woman's
+faculties past naturalness. She must never expose her feelings to her
+lover; she must make her counsel weighty--otherwise she is little his
+nymph of the pure wells, and what she soon may be, the world will say.
+She has also, most imperatively, to dazzle him without the betrayal of
+artifice, where simple spontaneousness is beyond conjuring.  But feelings
+that are constrained becloud the judgement besides arresting the fine jet
+of delivery wherewith the mastered lover is taught through his ears to
+think himself prompted, and submit to be controlled, by a creature super-
+feminine.  She must make her counsel so weighty in poignant praises as to
+repress impulses that would rouse her own; and her betraying
+impulsiveness was a subject of reflection to Diana after she had given
+Percy Dacier, metaphorically, the key of her house.  Only as true Egeria
+could she receive him.  She was therefore grateful, she thanked and
+venerated this noblest of lovers for his not pressing to the word of
+love, and so strengthening her to point his mind, freshen his moral
+energies and inspirit him.  His chivalrous acceptance of the conditions
+of their renewed intimacy was a radiant knightliness to Diana, elevating
+her with a living image for worship:--he so near once to being the
+absolute lord of her destinies!  How to reward him, was her sole
+dangerous thought.  She prayed and strove that she might give him of her
+best, to practically help him; and she had reason to suppose she could do
+it, from the visible effect of her phrases.  He glistened in repeating
+them; he had fallen into the habit; before witnesses too; in the presence
+of Miss Paynham, who had taken earnestly to the art of painting, and
+obtained her dear Mrs. Warwick's promise of a few sittings for the sketch
+of a portrait, near the close of the season.  'A very daring thing to
+attempt,' Miss Paynham said, when he was comparing her first outlines and
+the beautiful breathing features.  'Even if one gets the face, the lips
+will seem speechless, to those who know her.'
+
+'If they have no recollection,' said Dacier.
+
+'I mean, the endeavour should be to represent them at the moment of
+speaking.'
+
+'Put it into the eyes.'  He looked at the eyes.
+
+She looked at the mouth.  'But it is the mouth, more than the eyes.'
+
+He looked at the face.  'Where there is character, you have only to study
+it to be sure of a likeness.'
+
+'That is the task, with one who utters jewels, Mr. Dacier.'
+
+'Bright wit, I fear, is above the powers of your art.'
+
+'Still I feel it could be done.  See--now--that!'
+
+Diana's lips had opened to say: 'Confess me a model model: I am dissected
+while I sit for portrayal.  I must be for a moment like the frog of the
+two countrymen who were disputing as to the manner of his death, when he
+stretched to yawn, upon which they agreed that he had defeated the truth
+for both of them.  I am not quite inanimate.'
+
+'Irish countrymen,' said Dacier.
+
+'The story adds, that blows were arrested; so confer the nationality as
+you please.'
+
+Diana had often to divert him from a too intent perusal of her features
+with sparkles and stories current or invented to serve the immediate
+purpose.
+
+Miss Paynham was Mrs. Warwick's guest for a fortnight, and observed them
+together.  She sometimes charitably laid down her pencil and left them,
+having forgotten this or that.  They were conversing of general matters
+with their usual crisp precision on her return, and she was rather like
+the two countrymen, in debating whether it was excess of coolness or
+discreetness; though she was convinced of their inclinations, and
+expected love some day to be leaping up.  Diana noticed that she had no
+reminder for leaving the room when it was Mr. Redworth present.  These
+two had become very friendly, according to her hopes; and Miss Paynham
+was extremely solicitous to draw suggestions from Mr. Redworth and win
+his approval.
+
+'Do I appear likely to catch the mouth now, do you think, Mr. Redworth?'
+
+He remarked, smiling at Diana's expressive dimple, that the mouth was
+difficult to catch.  He did not gaze intently.  Mr. Redworth was the
+genius of friendship, 'the friend of women,' Mrs. Warwick had said of
+him.  Miss Paynham discovered it, as regarded herself.  The portrait was
+his commission to her, kindly proposed, secretly of course, to give her
+occupation and the chance of winning a vogue with the face of a famous
+Beauty.  So many, however, were Mrs. Warwick's visitors, and so lively
+the chatter she directed, that accurate sketching was difficult to an
+amateurish hand.  Whitmonby, Sullivan Smith, Westlake, Henry Wilmers,
+Arthur Rhodes, and other gentlemen, literary and military, were almost
+daily visitors when it became known that the tedium of the beautiful
+sitter required beguiling and there was a certainty of finding her at
+home.  On Mrs. Warwick's Wednesday numerous ladies decorated the group.
+Then was heard such a rillet of dialogue without scandal or politics,
+as nowhere else in Britain; all vowed it subsequently; for to the
+remembrance it seemed magical.  Not a breath of scandal, and yet the
+liveliest flow.  Lady Pennon came attended by a Mr. Alexander Hepburn,
+a handsome Scot, at whom Dacier shot one of his instinctive keen glances,
+before seeing that the hostess had mounted a transient colour.  Mr.
+Hepburn, in settling himself on his chair rather too briskly, contrived
+the next minute to break a precious bit of China standing by his elbow;
+and Lady Pennon cried out, with sympathetic anguish: 'Oh, my dear, what a
+trial for you!'
+
+'Brittle is foredoomed,' said Diana, unruffled.
+
+She deserved compliments, and would have had them if she had not wounded
+the most jealous and petulant of her courtiers.
+
+'Then the Turk is a sapient custodian!' said Westlake, vexed with her
+flush at the entrance of the Scot.
+
+Diana sedately took his challenge.  'We, Mr. Westlake, have the
+philosophy of ownership.'
+
+Mr. Hepburn penitentially knelt to pick up the fragments, and Westlake
+murmured over his head: 'As long as it is we who are the cracked.'
+
+'Did we not start from China?'
+
+'We were consequently precipitated to Stamboul.'
+
+'You try to elude the lesson.'
+
+'I remember my first paedagogue telling me so when he rapped the book on
+my cranium.'
+
+'The mark of the book is not a disfigurement.'
+
+It was gently worded, and the shrewder for it.  The mark of the book,
+if not a disfigurement, was a characteristic of Westlake's fashion of
+speech.  Whitmonby nodded twice, for signification of a palpable hit in
+that bout; and he noted within him the foolishness of obtruding the
+remotest allusion to our personality when crossing the foils with a
+woman.  She is down on it like the lightning, quick as she is in her
+contracted circle, politeness guarding her from a riposte.
+
+Mr. Hepburn apologized very humbly, after regaining his chair.  Diana
+smiled and said: 'Incidents in a drawing-room are prize-shots at
+Dulness.'
+
+'And in a dining-room too,' added Sullivan Smith.  'I was one day at a
+dinner-party, apparently of undertakers hired to mourn over the joints
+and the birds in the dishes, when the ceiling came down, and we all
+sprang up merry as crickets.  It led to a pretty encounter and a real
+prize-shot.'
+
+'Does that signify a duel?' asked Lady Pennon.
+
+''Twould be the vulgar title, to bring it into discredit with the
+populace, my lady.'
+
+'Rank me one of the populace then!  I hate duelling and rejoice that it
+is discountenanced.'
+
+'The citizens, and not the populace, I think Mr. Sullivan Smith means,'
+Diana said.  'The citizen is generally right in morals.  My father also
+was against the practice, when it raged at its "prettiest."  I have heard
+him relate a story of a poor friend of his, who had to march out for a
+trifle, and said, as he accepted the invitation, "It's all nonsense!"
+and walking to the measured length, "It's all nonsense, you know!"  and
+when lying on the ground, at his last gasp, "I told you it was all
+nonsense!"'
+
+Sullivan Smith leaned over to Whitmonby and Dacier amid the ejaculations,
+and whispered: 'A lady's way of telling the story!--and excuseable to
+her:--she had to Jonah the adjective.  What the poor fellow said was--'
+He murmured the sixty-pounder adjective, as in the belly of the whale, to
+rightly emphasize his noun.
+
+Whitmonby nodded to the superior relish imparted by the vigour of
+masculine veracity in narration.  'A story for its native sauce
+piquante,' he said.
+
+'Nothing without it!'
+
+They had each a dissolving grain of contempt for women compelled by
+their delicacy to spoil that kind of story which demands the piquant
+accompaniment to flavour it racily and make it passable.  For to see
+insipid mildness complacently swallowed as an excellent thing, knowing
+the rich smack of savour proper to the story, is your anecdotal
+gentleman's annoyance.  But if the anecdote had supported him, Sullivan
+Smith would have let the expletive rest.
+
+Major Carew Mahoney capped Mrs. Warwick's tale of the unfortunate
+duellist with another, that confessed the practice absurd, though he
+approved of it; and he cited Lord Larrian's opinion: 'It keeps men braced
+to civil conduct.'
+
+'I would not differ with the dear old lord; but no! the pistol is the
+sceptre of the bully,' said Diana.
+
+Mr. Hepburn, with the widest of eyes on her in perpetuity, warmly agreed;
+and the man was notorious among men for his contrary action.
+
+'Most righteously our Princess Egeria distinguishes her reign by
+prohibiting it,' said Lady Singleby.
+
+'And how,' Sullivan Smith sighed heavily, 'how, I'd ask, are ladies to be
+protected from the bully?'
+
+He was beset: 'So it was all for us? all in consideration for our
+benefit?'
+
+He mournfully exclaimed: 'Why, surely!'
+
+'That is the funeral apology of the Rod, at the close of every barbarous
+chapter,' said Diana.
+
+'Too fine in mind, too fat in body; that is a consequence with men, dear
+madam.  The conqueror stands to his weapons, or he loses his
+possessions.'
+
+'Mr. Sullivan Smith jumps at his pleasure from the special to the
+general, and will be back, if we follow him, Lady Pennon.  It is the
+trick men charge to women, showing that they can resemble us.'
+
+Lady Pennon thumped her knee.  'Not a bit.  There's no resemblance, and
+they know nothing of us.'
+
+'Women are a blank to them, I believe,' said Whitmonby, treacherously
+bowing;--and Westlake said:
+
+'Traces of a singular scrawl have been observed when they were held in
+close proximity to the fire.'
+
+'Once, on the top of a coach,' Whitmonby resumed, 'I heard a comely dame
+of the period when summers are ceasing threatened by her husband with a
+divorce, for omitting to put sandwiches in their luncheon-basket.  She
+made him the inscrutable answer: "Ah, poor man! you will go down ignorant
+to your grave!"  We laughed, and to this day I cannot tell you why.'
+
+'That laugh was from a basket lacking provision; and I think we could
+trace our separation to it,' Diana said to Lady Pennon, who replied:
+'They expose themselves; they get no nearer to the riddle.'
+
+Miss Courtney, a rising young actress, encouraged by a smile from Mrs.
+Warwick, remarked: 'On the stage, we have each our parts equally.'
+
+'And speaking parts; not personae mutae.'
+
+'The stage has advanced in verisimilitude,' Henry Wilmers added slyly;
+and Diana rejoined: 'You recognize a verisimilitude of the mirror when
+it is in advance of reality.  Flatter the sketch, Miss Paynham, for a
+likeness to be seen.  Probably there are still Old Conservatives who
+would prefer the personation of us by boys.'
+
+'I don't know,' Westlake affected dubiousness.  'I have heard that a step
+to the riddle is gained by a serious contemplation of boys.'
+
+'Serious?'
+
+'That is the doubt.'
+
+'The doubt throws its light on the step!'
+
+'I advise them not to take any leap from their step,' said Lady Pennon.
+
+'It would be a way of learning that we are no wiser than our sires; but
+perhaps too painful a way,' Whitmonby observed.  'Poor Mountford Wilts
+boasted of knowing women; and--he married.  To jump into the mouth of the
+enigma, is not to read it.'
+
+'You are figures of conceit when you speculate on us, Mr. Whitmonby.'
+
+'An occupation of our leisure, my lady, for your amusement.'
+
+'The leisure of the humming-top, a thousand to the minute, with the
+pretence that it sleeps!' Diana said.
+
+'The sacrilegious hand to strip you of your mystery is withered as it
+stretches,' exclaimed Westlake.  'The sage and the devout are in accord
+for once.'
+
+'And whichever of the two I may be, I'm one of them, happy to do my
+homage blindfold!' Sullivan Smith waved the sign of it.
+
+Diana sent her eyes over him and Mr. Hepburn, seeing Dacier.  'That rosy
+mediaevalism seems the utmost we can expect.'  An instant she saddened,
+foreboding her words to be ominous, because of suddenly thirsting for a
+modern cry from him, the silent.  She quitted her woman's fit of
+earnestness, and took to the humour that pleased him.  'Aslauga's knight,
+at his blind man's buff of devotion, catches the hem of the tapestry and
+is found by his lady kissing it in a trance of homage five hours long!
+Sir Hilary of Agincourt, returned from the wars to his castle at
+midnight, hears that the chitellaine is away dancing, and remains with
+all his men mounted in the courtyard till the grey morn brings her back!
+Adorable!  We had a flag flying in those days.  Since men began to fret
+the riddle, they have hauled it down half-mast.  Soon we shall behold a
+bare pole and hats on around it.  That is their solution.'
+
+A smile circled at the hearing of Lady Singleby say: 'Well, I am all for
+our own times, however literal the men.'
+
+'We are two different species!' thumped Lady Pennon, swimming on the
+theme.  'I am sure, I read what they write of women!  And their
+heroines!'
+
+Lady Esquart acquiesced: 'We are utter fools or horrid knaves.'
+
+'Nature's original hieroglyphs--which have that appearance to the
+peruser,' Westlake assented.
+
+'And when they would decipher us, and they hit on one of our "arts," the
+literary pirouette they perform is memorable.'  Diana looked invitingly
+at Dacier.  'But I for one discern a possible relationship and a
+likeness.'
+
+'I think it exists--behind a curtain,' Dacier replied.
+
+'Before the era of the Nursery.  Liberty to grow; independence is the key
+of the secret.'
+
+'And what comes after the independence?' he inquired.
+
+Whitmonby, musing that some distraction of an earnest incentive spoilt
+Mrs. Warwick's wit, informed him: 'The two different species then break
+their shallow armistice and join the shock of battle for possession of
+the earth, and we are outnumbered and exterminated, to a certainty.
+So I am against independence.'
+
+'Socially a Mussulman, subject to explosions!' Diana said.  'So the
+eternal duel between us is maintained, and men will protest that they are
+for civilization.  Dear me, I should like to write a sketch of the women
+of the future--don't be afraid!--the far future.  What a different earth
+you will see!'
+
+And very different creatures!  the gentlemen unanimously surmised.
+Westlake described the fairer portion, no longer the weaker; frightful
+hosts.
+
+Diana promised him a sweeter picture, if ever she brought her hand to
+paint it.
+
+'You would be offered up to the English national hangman, Jehoiachim
+Sneer,' interposed Arthur Rhodes, evidently firing a gun too big for him,
+of premeditated charging, as his patroness perceived; but she knew him to
+be smarting under recent applications of the swish of Mr. Sneer, and that
+he rushed to support her.  She covered him by saying: 'If he has to be
+encountered, he kills none but the cripple,' wherewith the dead pause
+ensuing from a dose of outlandish speech in good company was bridged,
+though the youth heard Westlake mutter unpleasantly: 'Jehoiachim,' and
+had to endure a stare of Dacier's, who did not conceal his want of
+comprehension of the place he occupied in Mrs. Warwick's gatherings.
+
+'They know nothing of us whatever!' Lady Pennon harped on her dictum.
+
+'They put us in a case and profoundly study the captive creature,' said
+Diana: 'but would any man understand this .  .  . ?' She dropped her
+voice and drew in the heads of Lady Pennon, Lady Singleby, Lady Esquart
+and Miss Courtney: 'Real woman's nature speaks.  A maid of mine had a
+"follower."  She was a good girl; I was anxious about her and asked her
+if she could trust him.  "Oh, yes, ma'am," she replied, "I can; he's quite
+like a female."  I longed to see the young man, to tell him he had
+received the highest of eulogies.'
+
+The ladies appreciatingly declared that such a tale was beyond the
+understandings of men.  Miss Paynham primmed her mouth, admitting to
+herself her inability to repeat such a tale; an act that she deemed not
+'quite like a lady.'  She had previously come to the conclusion that Mrs.
+Warwick, with all her generous qualities, was deficient in delicate
+sentiment--owing perhaps to her coldness of temperament.  Like Dacier
+also, she failed to comprehend the patronage of Mr. Rhodes: it led to
+suppositions; indefinite truly, and not calumnious at all; but a young
+poet, rather good-looking and well built, is not the same kind of wing-
+chick as a young actress, like Miss Courtney--Mrs. Warwick's latest
+shieldling: he is hardly enrolled for the reason that was assumed to
+sanction Mrs. Warwick's maid in the encouragement of her follower.
+Miss Paynham sketched on, with her thoughts in her bosom: a damsel
+castigatingly pursued by the idea of sex as the direct motive of every
+act of every person surrounding, her; deductively therefore that a
+certain form of the impelling passion, mild or terrible, or capricious,
+or it might be less pardonable, was unceasingly at work among the human
+couples up to decrepitude.  And she too frequently hit the fact to doubt
+her gift of reading into them.  Mr. Dacier was plain, and the state of
+young Mr. Rhodes; and the Scottish gentleman was at least a vehement
+admirer.  But she penetrated the breast of Mr. Thomas Redworth as well,
+mentally tore his mask of friendship to shreds.  He was kind indeed in
+commissioning her to do the portrait.  His desire for it, and his urgency
+to have the features exactly given, besides the infrequency of his visits
+of late, when a favoured gentleman was present, were the betraying signs.
+Deductively, moreover, the lady who inspired the passion in numbers of
+gentlemen and set herself to win their admiration with her lively play of
+dialogue, must be coquettish; she could hold them only by coldness.
+Anecdotes, epigrams, drolleries, do not bubble to the lips of a woman who
+is under an emotional spell: rather they prove that she has the spell for
+casting.  It suited Mr. Dacier, Miss Paynham thought: it was cruel to Mr.
+Redworth; at whom, of all her circle, the beautiful woman looked, when
+speaking to him, sometimes tenderly.
+
+'Beware the silent one of an assembly!' Diana had written.  She did not
+think of her words while Miss Paynham continued mutely sketching.  The
+silent ones, with much conversation around them, have their heads at
+work, critically perforce; the faster if their hands are occupied; and
+the point they lean to do is the pivot of their thoughts.  Miss Paynham
+felt for Mr. Redworth.
+
+Diana was unaware of any other critic present than him she sought to
+enliven, not unsuccessfully, notwithstanding his English objection to the
+pitch of the converse she led, and a suspicion of effort to support it:--
+just a doubt, with all her easy voluble run, of the possibility of
+naturalness in a continuous cleverness.  But he signified pleasure,
+and in pleasing him she was happy: in the knowledge that she dazzled,
+was her sense of safety.  Percy hated scandal; he heard none.  He wanted
+stirring, cheering; in her house he had it.  He came daily, and as it was
+her wish that new themes, new flights of converse, should delight him and
+show her exhaustless, to preserve her ascendancy, she welcomed him
+without consulting the world.  He was witness of Mr. Hepburn's
+presentation of a costly China vase, to repair the breach in her array
+of ornaments, and excuse a visit.  Judging by the absence of any blow
+within, he saw not a sign of coquettry.  Some such visit had been
+anticipated by the prescient woman, so there was no reddening.  She
+brought about an exchange of sentences between him and her furious
+admirer, sparing either of them a glimpse of which was the sacrifice to
+the other, amusing them both.  Dacier could allow Mr. Hepburn to outsit
+him; and he left them, proud of his absolute confidence in her.
+
+She was mistaken in imagining that her social vivacity, mixed with
+comradeship of the active intellect, was the charm which kept Mr. Percy
+Dacier temperate when he well knew her to distinguish him above her
+courtiers.  Her powers of dazzling kept him tame; they did not stamp her
+mark on him.  He was one of the order of highly polished men, ignorant of
+women, who are impressed for long terms by temporary flashes, that hold
+them bound until a fresh impression comes, to confirm or obliterate the
+preceding.  Affairs of the world he could treat competently; he had a
+head for high politics and the management of men; the feminine half of
+the world was a confusion and a vexation to his intelligence,
+characterless; and one woman at last appearing decipherable, he fancied
+it must be owing to her possession of character, a thing prized the more
+in women because of his latent doubt of its existence.  Character, that
+was the mark he aimed at; that moved him to homage as neither sparkling
+wit nor incomparable beauty, nor the unusual combination, did.  To be
+distinguished by a woman of character (beauty and wit for jewellery), was
+his minor ambition in life, and if Fortune now gratified it, he owned to
+the flattery.  It really seemed by every test that she had the quality.
+Since the day when he beheld her by the bedside of his dead uncle, and
+that one on the French sea-sands, and again at Copsley, ghostly white out
+of her wrestle with death, bleeding holy sweat of brow for her friend,
+the print of her features had been on him as an index of depth of
+character, imposing respect and admiration--a sentiment imperilled by her
+consent to fly with him.  Her subsequent reserve until they met--by an
+accident that the lady at any rate was not responsible for, proved the
+quality positively.  And the nature of her character, at first suspected,
+vanquished him more, by comparison, than her vivid intellect, which he
+originally, and still lingeringly, appreciated in condescension, as a
+singular accomplishment, thrilling at times, now and then assailably
+feminine.  But, after her consent to a proposal that caused him
+retrospective worldly shudders, and her composed recognition of the
+madness, a character capable of holding him in some awe was real majesty,
+and it rose to the clear heights, with her mental attributes for
+satellites.  His tendency to despise women was wholesomely checked by
+the experience to justify him in saying, Here is a worthy one!  She was
+health to him, as well as trusty counsel.  Furthermore, where he
+respected, he was a governed man, free of the common masculine craze to
+scale fortresses for the sake of lowering flags.  Whilst under his
+impression of her character, he submitted honourably to the ascendancy
+of a lady whose conduct suited him and whose preference flattered; whose
+presence was very refreshing; whose letters were a stimulant.  Her
+letters were really running well-waters, not a lover's delusion of the
+luminous mind of his lady.  They sparkled in review and preserved their
+integrity under critical analysis.  The reading of them hurried him in
+pursuit of her from house to house during the autumn; and as she did not
+hint at the shadow his coming cast on her, his conscience was easy.
+Regarding their future, his political anxieties were a mountainous
+defile, curtaining the outlook.  They met at Lockton, where he arrived
+after a recent consultation with his Chief, of whom, and the murmurs of
+the Cabinet, he spoke to Diana openly, in some dejection.
+
+'They might see he has been breaking with his party for the last four
+years,' she said.  'The plunge to be taken is tremendous.'
+
+'But will he?  He appears too despondent for a header.'
+
+'We cannot dance on a quaking floor.'
+
+'No; it 's exactly that quake of the floor which gives "much qualms," to
+me as well,' said Dacier.
+
+'A treble Neptune's power!' she rejoined, for his particular delectation.
+'Enough if he hesitates.  I forgive him his nausea.  He awaits the
+impetus, and it will reach him, and soon.  He will not wait for the mob
+at his heels, I am certain.  A Minister who does that, is a post, and
+goes down with the first bursting of the dam.  He has tried compromise
+and discovered that it does not appease the Fates; is not even a
+makeshift-mending at this hour.  He is a man of nerves, very sensitively
+built; as quick--quicker than a woman, I could almost say, to feel the
+tremble of the air-forerunner of imperative changes.'
+
+Dacier brightened fondly.  'You positively describe him; paint him to the
+life, without knowing him!'
+
+'I have seen him; and if I paint, whose are the colours?'
+
+'Sometimes I repeat you to him, and I get all the credit,' said Dacier.
+
+'I glow with pride to think of speaking anything that you repeat,' said
+Diana, and her eyes were proudly lustreful.
+
+Their love was nourished on these mutual flatteries. Thin food for
+passion!  The innocence of it sanctioned the meetings and the
+appointments to meet.  When separated they were interchanging letters,
+formally worded in the apostrophe and the termination, but throbbingly
+full: or Diana thought so of Percy's letters, with grateful justice; for
+his manner of opening his heart in amatory correspondence was to confide
+important, secret matters, up to which mark she sprang to reply in
+counsel.  He proved his affection by trusting her; his respect by his
+tempered style: 'A Greenland style of writing,' she had said of an
+unhappy gentleman's epistolary compositions resembling it; and now the
+same official baldness was to her mind Italianly rich; it called forth
+such volumes.
+
+Flatteries that were thin food for passion appeared the simplest
+exchanges of courtesy, and her meetings with her lover, judging by the
+nature of the discourse they held, so, consequent to their joint interest
+in the great crisis anticipated, as to rouse her indignant surprise and a
+turn for downright rebellion when the Argus world signified the fact of
+its having one eye, or more, wide open.
+
+Debit and Credit, too, her buzzing familiars, insisted on an audience at
+each ear, and at the house-door, on her return to London.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIX
+
+SHOWS THE APPROACHES OF THE POLITICAL AND THE DOMESTIC CRISIS IN COMPANY
+
+There was not much talk of Diana between Lady Dunstane and her customary
+visitor Tom Redworth now.  She was shy in speaking of the love-stricken
+woman, and more was in his mind for thought than for speech.  She some
+times wondered how much he might know, ending with the reflection that
+little passing around was unknown to him.  He had to shut his mind
+against thought, against all meditation upon Mrs. Warwick; it was based
+scientifically when speculating and calculating, on the material element
+--a talisman.  Men and women crossing the high seas of life he had found
+most readable under that illuminating inquiry, as to their means.  An
+inspector of sea worthy ships proceeds in like manner.  Whence would the
+money come?  He could not help the bent of his mind; but he could avoid
+subjecting her to the talismanic touch.  The girl at the Dublin Ball,
+the woman at the fire-grate of The Crossways, both in one were his Diana.
+Now and then, hearing an ugly whisper, his manful sympathy with the mere
+woman in her imprisoned liberty, defended her desperately from charges
+not distinctly formulated within him:--'She's not made of stone.'  That
+was a height of self-abnegation to shake the poor fellow to his roots;
+but, then, he had no hopes of his own; and he stuck to it.  Her choice of
+a man like Dacier, too, of whom Redworth judged highly, showed nobility.
+She irradiated the man; but no baseness could be in such an alliance.
+If allied, they were bound together for good.  The tie-supposing a
+villain world not wrong--was only not the sacred tie because of
+impediments.  The tie!--he deliberated, and said stoutly--No.  Men of
+Redworth's nature go through sharp contests, though the duration of them
+is short, and the tussle of his worship of this woman with the
+materialistic turn of his mind was closed by the complete shutting up of
+the latter under lock and bar; so that a man, very little of an idealist,
+was able to sustain her in the pure imagination--where she did almost
+belong to him.  She was his, in a sense, because she might have been his-
+-but for an incredible extreme of folly.  The dark ring of the eclipse
+cast by some amazing foolishness round the shining crescent perpetually
+in secret claimed the whole sphere of her, by what might have been, while
+admitting her lost to him in fact.  To Thomas Redworth's mind the lack of
+perfect sanity in his conduct at any period of manhood, was so entirely
+past belief that he flew at the circumstances confirming the charge, and
+had wrestles with the angel of reality, who did but set him dreaming
+backward, after flinging him.
+
+He heard at Lady Wathin's that Mrs. Warwick was in town for the winter.
+'Mr. Dacier is also in town,' Lady Wathin said, with an acid indication
+of the needless mention of it.  'We have not seen him.'  She invited
+Redworth to meet a few friends at dinner.  'I think you admire Miss
+Asper: in my idea a very saint among young women;--and you know what the
+young women of our day are.  She will be present.  She is, you are aware,
+England's greatest heiress.  Only yesterday, hearing of that poor man Mr.
+Warwick's desperate attack of illness--heart!--and of his having no
+relative or friend to soothe his pillow,--he is lying in absolute
+loneliness,--she offered to go and nurse him!  Of course it could not
+be done.  It is not her place.  The beauty of the character of a dear
+innocent young girl, with every gratification at command, who could make
+the offer, strikes me as unparalleled.  She was perfectly sincere--she is
+sincerity.  She asked at once, Where is he?  She wished me to accompany
+her on a first visit.  I saw a tear.'
+
+Redworth had called at Lady Wathin's for information of the state of Mr.
+Warwick, concerning which a rumour was abroad.  No stranger to the
+vagrant compassionateness of sentimentalists;--rich, idle, conscience-
+pricked or praise-catching;--he was unmoved by the tale that Miss Asper
+had proposed to go to Mr. Warwick's sick-bed in the uniform of a Sister
+of Charity.--'Speaking French!' Lady Wathin exclaimed; and his head
+rocked, as he said:
+
+'An Englishman would not be likely to know better.'
+
+'She speaks exquisite French--all European languages, Mr. Redworth.
+She does not pretend to wit.  To my thinking, depth of sentiment is
+a far more feminine accomplishment.  It assuredly will be found a
+greater treasure.'
+
+The modest man (modest in such matters) was led by degrees to fancy
+himself sounded regarding Miss Asper: a piece of sculpture glacially
+decorative of the domestic mansion in person, to his thinking; and as to
+the nature of it--not a Diana, with all her faults!
+
+If Diana had any faults, in a world and a position so heavily against
+her!  He laughed to himself, when alone, at the neatly implied bitter
+reproach cast on the wife by the forsaken young lady, who proposed to
+nurse the abandoned husband of the woman bereaving her of the man she
+loved.  Sentimentalists enjoy these tricks, the conceiving or the doing
+of them--the former mainly, which are cheaper, and equally effective.
+Miss Asper might be deficient in wit; this was a form of practical wit,
+occasionally exhibited by creatures acting on their instincts.  Warwick
+he pitied, and he put compulsion on himself to go and see the poor
+fellow, the subject of so sublime a generosity.  Mr. Warwick sat in an
+arm-chair, his legs out straight on the heels, his jaw dragging hollow
+cheeks, his hands loosely joined; improving in health, he said.  A demure
+woman of middle age was in attendance.  He did not speak of his wife.
+Three times he said disconnectedly, 'I hear reports,' and his eyelids
+worked.  Redworth talked of general affairs, without those consolatory
+efforts, useless between men, which are neither medicine nor good honest
+water:--he judged by personal feelings.  In consequence, he left an
+invalid the sourer for his visit.
+
+Next day he received a briefly-worded summons from Mrs. Warwick.
+
+Crossing the park on the line to Diana's house, he met Miss Paynham, who
+grieved to say that Mrs. Warwick could not give her a sitting; and in a
+still mournfuller tone, imagined he would find her at home, and alone by
+this time.  'I left no one but Mr. Dacier there,' she observed.
+
+'Mrs. Warwick will be disengaged to-morrow, no doubt,' he said
+consolingly.
+
+Her head performed the negative.  'They talk politics, and she becomes
+animated, loses her pose.  I will persevere, though I fear I have
+undertaken a task too much for me.'
+
+'I am deeply indebted to you for the attempt.'  Redworth bowed to her and
+set his face to the Abbey-towers, which wore a different aspect in the
+smoked grey light since his two minutes of colloquy.  He had previously
+noticed that meetings with Miss Paynham produced a similar effect on him,
+a not so very impressionable man.  And how was it done?  She told him
+nothing he did not know or guess.
+
+Diana was alone.  Her manner, after the greeting, seemed feverish.  She
+had not to excuse herself for abruptness when he heard the nature of the
+subject.  Her counsellor and friend was informed, in feminine style, that
+she had, requested him to call, for the purpose of consulting him with
+regard to a matter she had decided upon; and it was, the sale of The
+Crossways.  She said that it would have gone to her heart once; she
+supposed she had lost her affection for the place, or had got the better
+of her superstitions.  She spoke lamely as well as bluntly.  The place
+was hers, she said; her own property.  Her husband could not interdict a
+sale.
+
+Redworth addressed himself to her smothered antagonism.  'Even if he had
+rights, as they are termed .  .  .  I think you might count on their not
+being pressed.'
+
+'I have been told of illness.'  She tapped her foot on the floor.
+
+'His present state of health is unequal to his ordinary duties.'
+
+'Emma Dunstane is fully supplied with the latest intelligence, Mr.
+Redworth.  You know the source.'
+
+'I mention it simply .  .  .'
+
+'Yes, yes.  What I have to protest is, that in this respect I am free.
+The Law has me fast, but leaves me its legal view of my small property.
+I have no authority over me.  I can do as I please, in this, without a
+collision, or the dread of one.  It is the married woman's perpetual
+dread when she ventures a step.  Your Law originally presumed her a
+China-footed animal.  And more, I have a claim for maintenance.'
+
+She crimsoned angrily.
+
+Redworth showed a look of pleasure, hard to understand.  'The application
+would be sufficient, I fancy,' he said.
+
+'It should have been offered.'
+
+'Did you not decline it?'
+
+'I declined to apply for it.  I thought--But, Mr. Redworth, another
+thing, concerning us all: I want very much to hear your ideas of the
+prospects of the League; because I know you have ideas.  The leaders are
+terrible men; they fascinate me.  They appear to move with an army of
+facts.  They are certainly carrying the country.  I am obliged to think
+them sincere.  Common agitators would not hold together, as they do.
+They gather strength each year.  If their statistics are not illusory--
+an army of phantoms instead of one of facts; and they knock at my head
+without admission, I have to confess; they must win.'
+
+'Ultimately, it is quite calculable that they will win,' said Redworth;
+and he was led to discourse of rates and duties and prohibitive tariffs
+to a woman surprisingly athirst, curious for every scrap of intelligence
+relating to the power, organization, and schemes of the League.  'Common
+sense is the secret of every successful civil agitation,' he said.  'Rap
+it unremittingly on crowds of the thickest of human heads, and the
+response comes at last to sweep all before it.  You may reckon that the
+country will beat the landlords--for that is our question.  Is it one of
+your political themes?'
+
+'I am not presumptuous to such a degree:--a poor scholar,' Diana replied.
+'Women striving to lift their heads among men deserve the sarcasm.'
+
+He denied that any sarcasm was intended, and the lesson continued.  When
+she had shaped in her mind some portion of his knowledge of the subject,
+she reverted casually to her practical business.  Would he undertake to
+try to obtain a purchaser of The Crossways, at the price he might deem
+reasonable?  She left the price entirely to his judgement.  And now she
+had determined to part with the old place, the sooner the better!  She
+said that smiling; and Redworth smiled, outwardly and inwardly.  Her talk
+of her affairs was clearer to him than her curiosity for the mysteries of
+the League.  He gained kind looks besides warm thanks by the promise to
+seek a purchaser; especially by his avoidance of prying queries.  She
+wanted just this excellent automaton fac-totum; and she referred him to
+Mr. Braddock for the title-deeds, et caetera--the chirping phrase of
+ladies happily washing their hands of the mean details of business.
+
+'How of your last work?' he asked her.
+
+Serenest equanimity rejoined: 'As I anticipated, it is not popular.  The
+critics are of one mind with the public.  You may have noticed, they
+rarely flower above that rocky surface.  THE CANTATRICE sings them a
+false note.  My next will probably please them less.'
+
+Her mobile lips and brows shot the faint upper-wreath of a smile
+hovering.  It was designed to display her philosophy.
+
+'And what is the name of your next?' said he.
+
+'I name it THE MAN OF TWO MINDS, if you can allow that to be in nature.'
+
+'Contra-distinguished from the woman?'
+
+'Oh!  you must first believe the woman to have one.'
+
+'You are working on it?'
+
+'By fits.  And I forgot, Mr. Redworth: I have mislaid my receipts, and
+must ask you for the address of your wine-merchant;--or, will you?
+Several dozen of the same wines.  I can trust him to be in awe of you,
+and the good repute of my table depends on his honesty.'
+
+Redworth took the definite order for a large supply of wine.
+
+She gave him her hand: a lost hand, dear to hold, needing to be guided,
+he feared.  For him, it was merely a hand, cut off from the wrist; and he
+had performed that executive part!  A wiser man would now have been the
+lord of it .  .  .  .  So he felt, with his burning wish to protect and
+cherish the beloved woman, while saying: 'If we find a speedy bidder for
+The Crossways, you will have to thank our railways.'
+
+'You!' said Diana, confident in his ability to do every-thing of the
+practical kind.
+
+Her ingenuousness tickled him.  He missed her comic touches upon men and
+things, but the fever shown by her manner accounted for it.
+
+As soon as he left her, she was writing to the lover who had an hour
+previously been hearing her voice; the note of her theme being Party;
+and how to serve it, when to sacrifice it to the Country.  She wrote,
+carolling bars of the Puritani marches; and such will passion do, that
+her choice of music was quite in harmony with her theme.  The martially-
+amorous melodies of Italian Opera in those days fostered a passion
+challenged to intrepidity from the heart of softness; gliding at the same
+time, and putting warm blood even into dull arithmetical figures which
+might be important to her lover, her hero fronting battle.  She condensed
+Redworth's information skilfully, heartily giving it and whatever she had
+imbibed, as her own, down to the remark: 'Common sense in questions of
+justice, is a weapon that makes way into human heads and wins the certain
+majority, if we strike with it incessantly.'  Whether anything she wrote
+was her own, mattered little: the savour of Percy's praise, which none
+could share with her, made it instantly all her own.  Besides she wrote
+to strengthen him; she naturally laid her friends and the world under
+contribution; and no other sort of writing was possible.  Percy had not a
+common interest in fiction; still less for high comedy.  He liked the
+broad laugh when he deigned to open books of that sort; puns and strong
+flavours and harlequin surprises; and her work would not admit of them,
+however great her willingness to force her hand for his amusement:
+consequently her inventiveness deadened.  She had to cease whipping it.
+'My poor old London cabhorse of a pen shall go to grass!' she sighed,
+looking to the sale of The Crossways for money; looking no farther.
+
+Those marshalled battalions of Debit and Credit were in hostile order,
+the weaker simply devoted to fighting for delay, when a winged messenger
+bearing the form of old Mr. Braddock descended to her with the
+reconciling news that a hermit bachelor, an acquaintance of Mr.
+Redworth's--both of whom wore a gloomy hue in her mind immediately--had
+offered a sum for the purchase of The Crossways.  Considering the out-of-
+the-way district, Mr. Braddock thought it an excellent price to get.  She
+thought the reverse, but confessed that double the sum would not have
+altered her opinion.  Double the sum scarcely counted for the service she
+required of it for much more than a year.  The money was paid shortly
+after into her Bank, and then she enjoyed the contemptuous felicity of
+tossing meat to her lions, tigers, wolves, and jackals, who, but for the
+fortunate intervention, would have been feeding on her.  These menagerie
+beasts of prey were the lady's tradesmen, Debit's hungry-brood.  She had
+a rapid glimpse of a false position in regarding that legitimate band so
+scornfully: another glimpse likewise of a day to come when they might not
+be stopped at the door.  She was running a race with something; with
+what?  It was unnamed; it ran in a shroud.
+
+At times she surprised her heart violently beating when there had not
+been a thought to set it in motion.  She traced it once to the words,
+'next year,' incidentally mentioned.  'Free,' was a word that checked her
+throbs, as at a question of life or death.  Her solitude, excepting the
+hours of sleep, if then, was a time of irregular breathing.  The
+something unnamed, running beside her, became a dreadful familiar; the
+race between them past contemplation for ghastliness.  'But this is your
+Law!' she cried to the world, while blinding her eyes against a peep of
+the shrouded features.
+
+Singularly, she had but to abandon hope, and the shadowy figure vanished,
+the tragic race was ended.  How to live and think, and not to hope: the
+slave of passion had this problem before her.
+
+Other tasks were supportable, though one seemed hard at moments and was
+not passive; it attacked her.  The men and women of her circle
+derisively, unanimously, disbelieved in an innocence that forfeited
+reputation.  Women were complimentarily assumed to be not such gaping
+idiots.  And as the weeks advanced, a change came over Percy.  The
+gentleman had grown restless at covert congratulations, hollow to his
+knowledge, however much caressing vanity, and therefore secretly a wound
+to it.  One day, after sitting silent, he bluntly proposed to break 'this
+foolish trifling'; just in his old manner, though not so honourably; not
+very definitely either.  Her hand was taken.
+
+'I feared that dumbness!' Diana said, letting her hand go, but keeping
+her composure.  'My friend Percy, I am not a lion-tamer, and if you are
+of those animals, we break the chapter.  Plainly you think that where
+there appears to be a choice of fools, the woman is distinctly designed
+for the person.  Drop my hand, or I shall repeat the fable of the Goose
+with the Golden Eggs.'
+
+'Fables are applicable only in the school-room,' said he; and he ventured
+on 'Tony!'
+
+'I vowed an oath to my dear Emma--as good as to the heavens!  and that
+of itself would stay me from being insane again.'  She released herself.
+'Signor Percy, you teach me to suspect you of having an idle wish to
+pluck your plaything to pieces:--to boast of it?  Ah! my friend, I
+fancied I was of more value to you.  You must come less often; even to
+not at all, if you are one of those idols with feet of clay which leave
+the print of their steps in a room; or fall and crush the silly
+idolizer.'
+
+'But surely you know .  .  .'  said he.  'We can't have to wait long.'
+He looked full of hopeful meanings.
+
+'A reason .  .  .  !' She kept down her breath.  A longdrawn sigh
+followed, through parted lips.  She had a sensation of horror.
+'And I cannot propose to nurse him--Emma will not hear of it,' she said.
+'I dare not.  Hypocrite to that extreme?  Oh, no!  But I must hear
+nothing.  As it is, I am haunted.  Now let this pass.  Tony me no Tonies;
+I am stony to such whimpering business now we are in the van of the
+struggle.  All round us it sounds like war.  Last night I had Mr. Tonans
+dining here;--he wished to meet you; and you must have a private meeting
+with Mr. Whitmonby: he will be useful; others as well.  You are wrong in
+affecting contempt of the Press.  It perches you on a rock; but the
+swimmer in politics knows what draws the tides.  Your own people, your
+set, your class, are a drag to you, like inherited superstitions to the
+wakening brain.  The greater the glory!  For you see the lead you take?
+You are saving your class.  They should lead, and will, if they prove
+worthy in the crisis.  Their curious error is to believe in the stability
+of a monumental position.'
+
+'Perfectly true!' cried Dacier; and the next minute, heated by
+approbation, was begging for her hand earnestly.  She refused it.
+
+'But you say things that catch me!' he pleaded.  'Remember, it was nearly
+mine.  It soon will be mine.  I heard yesterday from Lady Wathin .  .  .
+well, if it pains you!'
+
+'Speak on,' said Diana, resigned to her thirsty ears.
+
+'He is not expected to last through the autumn.'
+
+'The calculation is hers?'
+
+'Not exactly:--judging from the symptoms.'
+
+Diana flashed a fiery eye into Dacier's, and rose.  She was past danger
+of melting, with her imagination darkened by the funeral image; but she
+craved solitude, and had to act the callous, to dismiss him.
+
+'Good.  Enough for the day.  Now leave me, if you please.  When we meet
+again, stifle that raven's croak.  I am not a "Sister of Charity,"
+but neither am I a vulture hovering for the horse in the desert to die.
+A poor simile!--when it is my own and not another's breath that I want.
+Nothing in nature, only gruesome German stories will fetch comparisons
+for the yoke of this Law of yours.  It seems the nightmare dream
+following an ogre's supper.'
+
+She was not acting the shiver of her frame.
+
+To-morrow was open to him, and prospect of better fortune, so he
+departed, after squeezing the hand she ceremoniously extended.
+
+But her woman's intuition warned her that she had not maintained the
+sovereign impression which was her security.  And hope had become a flame
+in her bosom that would no longer take the common extinguisher.  The race
+she ran was with a shrouded figure no more, but with the figure of the
+shroud; she had to summon paroxysms of a pity hard to feel, images of
+sickness, helplessness, the vaults, the last human silence for the
+stilling of her passionate heart.  And when this was partly effected, the
+question, Am I going to live?  renewed her tragical struggle.  Who was it
+under the vaults, in the shroud, between the planks?  and with human
+sensibility to swell the horror!  Passion whispered of a vaster sorrow
+needed for herself; and the hope conjuring those frightful complexities
+was needed to soothe her.  She pitied the man, but she was an enamoured
+woman.  Often of late she had been sharply stung, relaxed as well, by the
+observations of Danvers assisting at her toilette.  Had she beauty and
+charm, beauty and rich health in the young summer blooming of her days?
+--and all doomed to waste?  No insurgency of words arose in denunciation
+of the wrong done to her nature.  An undefined heavy feeling of wrong
+there was, just perceptive enough to let her know, without gravely
+shaming, that one or another must be slain for peace to come; for it is
+the case in which the world of the Laws overloading her is pitiless to
+women, deaf past ear-trumpets, past intercession; detesting and reviling
+them for a feeble human cry, and for one apparent step of revolt piling
+the pelted stones on them.  It will not discriminate shades of hue, it
+massacres all the shadowed.  They are honoured, after a fashion, at a
+certain elevation.  Descending from it, and purely to breathe common air
+(thus in her mind), they are scourged and outcast.  And alas!  the very
+pleading for them excites a sort of ridicule in their advocate.  How?
+She was utterly, even desperately, nay personally, earnest, and her
+humour closed her lips; though comical views of the scourged and outcast
+coming from the opposite party--the huge bully world--she would not have
+tolerated.  Diana raged at a prevailing strength on the part of that huge
+bully world, which seemed really to embrace the atmosphere.  Emma had
+said: 'The rules of Christian Society are a blessed Government for us
+women.  We owe it so much that there is not a brick of the fabric we
+should not prop.'  Emma's talk of obedience to the Laws, being Laws, was
+repeated by the rebel, with an involuntary unphrased comparison of the
+vessel in dock and the vessel at sea.
+
+When Dacier next called to see Mrs. Warwick, he heard that she had gone
+to Copsley for a couple of weeks.  The lesson was emphasized by her not
+writing:--and was it the tricky sex, or the splendid character of the
+woman, which dealt him this punishment?  Knowing how much  Diana
+forfeited for him, he was moved to some enthusiasm, despite his
+inclination to be hurt.
+
+She, on her return to London, gained a considerable increase of knowledge
+as to her position in the eye of the world; and unlike the result of her
+meditations derived from the clamouring tradesmen, whom she could excuse,
+she was neither illuminated nor cautioned by that dubious look; she
+conscientiously revolted.  Lady Pennon hinted a word for her Government.
+'A good deal of what you so capitally call "Green tea talk" is going on,
+my dear.'  Diana replied, without pretending to misunderstand.
+
+'Gossip is a beast of prey that does not wait for the death of the
+creature it devours.  They are welcome to my shadow, if the liberty I
+claim casts one, and it feeds them.'  To which the old lady rejoined:
+'Oh! I am with you through thick and thin.  I presented you at Court, and
+I stand by you.  Only, walk carefully.  Women have to walk with a train.
+You are too famous not to have your troops of watchers.'
+
+'But I mean to prove,' said Diana, 'that a woman can walk with her train
+independent of the common reserves and artifices.'
+
+'Not on highways, my dear!'
+
+Diana, praising the speaker, referred the whole truth in that to the
+material element of her metaphor.
+
+She was more astonished by Whitmonby's candid chiding; but with him she
+could fence, and men are easily diverted.  She had sent for him, to bring
+him and Percy Dacier together to a conference.  Unaware of the project,
+he took the opportunity of their privacy to speak of the great station
+open to her in London being imperilled; and he spoke of 'tongues,' and
+ahem!  A very little would have induced him to fill that empty vocable
+with a name.
+
+She had to pardon the critic in him for an unpleasant review of her
+hapless CANTATRICE; and as a means of evasion, she mentioned the poor
+book and her slaughter of the heroine, that he had complained of.
+
+'I killed her; I could not let her live.  You were unjust in accusing the
+authoress of heartlessness.'
+
+'If I did, I retract,' said he.  'She steers too evidently from the
+centre of the vessel.  She has the organ in excess.'
+
+'Proof that it is not squandered.'
+
+'The point concerns direction.'
+
+'Have I made so bad a choice of my friends?'
+
+'It is the common error of the sprightly to suppose that in parrying a
+thrust they blind our eyes.'
+
+'The world sees always what it desires to see, Mr. Whitmonby.'
+
+'The world, my dear Mrs. Warwick, is a blundering machine upon its own
+affairs, but a cruel sleuth-hound to rouse in pursuit.'
+
+'So now you have me chased by sight and scent.  And if I take wing?'
+
+'Shots!  volleys!--You are lawful game.  The choice you have made of your
+friends, should oblige you to think of them.'
+
+'I imagine I do.  Have I offended any, or one?'
+
+'I will not say that.  You know the commotion in a French kitchen when
+the guests of the house declined a particular dish furnished them by
+command.  The cook and his crew were loyal to their master, but, for the
+love of their Art, they sent him notice.  It is ill serving a mad
+sovereign.'
+
+Diana bowed to the compact little apologue.
+
+'I will tell you another story, traditional in our family from my great-
+grandmother, a Spanish woman,' she said.  'A cavalier serenaded his
+mistress, and rascal mercenaries fell upon him before he could draw
+sword.  He battered his guitar on their pates till the lattice opened
+with a cry, and startled them to flight.  "Thrice blessed and beloved!"
+he called to her above, in reference to the noise, "it was merely a
+diversion of the accompaniment."  Now there was loyal service to a
+sovereign!'
+
+'You are certainly an angel!' exclaimed Whitmonby.  'I swallow the story,
+and leave it to digestion to discover the appositeness.  Whatever tuneful
+instrument one of your friends possesses shall solace your slumbers or
+batter the pate of your enemy.  But discourage the habitual serenader.'
+
+'The musician you must mean is due here now, by appointment to meet you,'
+said Diana, and set him momentarily agape with the name of Mr. Percy
+Dacier.
+
+That was the origin of the alliance between the young statesman and a
+newspaper editor.  Whitmonby, accepting proposals which suited him,
+quitted the house, after an hour of political talk, no longer inclined to
+hint at the 'habitual serenader,' but very ready to fall foul of those
+who did, as he proved when the numbers buzzed openly.  Times were
+masculine; the excitement on the eve of so great a crisis, and Diana's
+comprehension of it and fine heading cry, put that weak matter aside.
+Moreover, he was taught to suppose himself as welcome a guest as Dacier;
+and the cook could stand criticism; the wines--wonderful to say of a
+lady's table--were trusty; the talk, on the political evenings and the
+social and anecdotal supper-nights, ran always in perfect accord with his
+ideal of the conversational orchestra: an improvized harmony, unmatched
+elsewhere.  She did not, he considered, so perfectly assort her dinner-
+guests; that was her one fault.  She had therefore to strain her
+adroitness to cover their deficiencies and fuse them.  But what other
+woman could have done it!  She led superbly.  If an Irishman was present,
+she kept him from overflooding, managed to extract just the flavour of
+him, the smack of salt.  She did even, at Whitmonby's table, on a red-
+letter Sunday evening, in concert with him and the Dean, bring down that
+cataract, the Bodleian, to the levels of interchanging dialogue by
+seasonable touches, inimitably done, and never done before.  Sullivan
+Smith, unbridled in the middle of dinner, was docile to her.  'Irishmen;'
+she said, pleading on their behalf to Whitmonby, who pronounced the race
+too raw for an Olympian feast, 'are invaluable if you hang them up to
+smoke and cure'; and the master of social converse could not deny that
+they were responsive to her magic.  The supper-nights were mainly devoted
+to Percy's friends.  He brought as many as he pleased, and as often as it
+pleased him; and it was her pride to provide Cleopatra banquets for the
+lover whose anxieties were soothed by them, and to whom she sacrificed
+her name willingly in return for a generosity that certain chance
+whispers of her heart elevated to the pitch of measureless.
+
+So they wore through the Session and the Autumn, clouds heavier, the
+League drumming, the cry of Ireland 'ominously Banshee,' as she wrote to
+Emma.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXX
+
+IN WHICH THERE IS A TASTE OF A LITTLE DINNER AND AN AFTERTASTE
+
+'But Tony lives!' Emma Dunstane cried, on her solitary height, with the
+full accent of envy marking the verb; and when she wrote enviously to her
+friend of the life among bright intelligences, and of talk worth hearing,
+it was a happy signification that health, frail though it might be, had
+grown importunate for some of the play of life.  Diana sent her word to
+name her day, and she would have her choicest to meet her dearest.  They
+were in the early days of December, not the best of times for improvized
+gatherings.  Emma wanted, however, to taste them as they cropped; she was
+also, owing to her long isolation, timid at a notion of encountering the
+pick of the London world, prepared by Tony to behold 'a wonder more than
+worthy of them,' as her friend unadvisedly wrote.  That was why she came
+unexpectedly, and for a mixture of reasons, went to an hotel.  Fatality
+designed it so.  She was reproached, but she said: 'You have to write or
+you entertain at night; I should be a clog and fret you.  My hotel is
+Maitland's; excellent; I believe I am to lie on the pillow where a
+crowned head reposed!  You will perceive that I am proud as well as
+comfortable.  And I would rather meet your usual set of guests.'
+
+'The reason why I have been entertaining at night is, that Percy is
+harassed and requires enlivening,' said Diana.  'He brings his friends.
+My house is open to them, if it amuses him.  What the world says, is past
+a thought.  I owe him too much.'
+
+Emma murmured that the world would soon be pacified.
+
+Diana shook her head.  'The poor man is better; able to go about his
+affairs; and I am honestly relieved.  It lays a spectre.  As for me, I do
+not look ahead.  I serve as a kind of secretary to Percy.  I labour at
+making abstracts by day, and at night preside at my suppertable.  You
+would think it monotonous; no incident varies the course we run.  I have
+no time to ask whether it is happiness.  It seems to bear a resemblance.'
+
+Emma replied: 'He may be everything you tell me.  He should not have
+chosen the last night of the Opera to go to your box and sit beside you
+till the fall of the curtain.  The presence at the Opera of a man
+notoriously indifferent to music was enough in itself.'
+
+Diana smiled with languor.  'You heard of that?  But the Opera was The
+Puritani, my favourite.  And he saw me sitting in Lady Pennon's box
+alone.  We were compromised neck-deep already.  I can kiss you, my own
+Emmy, till I die; 'but what the world says, is what the wind says.
+Besides he has his hopes....  If I am blackened ever so thickly, he can
+make me white.  Dear me!  if the world knew that he comes here almost
+nightly!  It will; and does it matter?  I am his in soul; the rest is
+waste-paper--a half-printed sheet.'
+
+'Provided he is worthy of such devotion!'
+
+'He is absolute worthiness.  He is the prince of men: I dread to say,
+mine!  for fear.  But Emmy will not judge him to-morrow by contrast with
+more voluble talkers.--I can do anything but read poetry now.  That kills
+me!--See him through me.  In nature, character, intellect, he has no
+rival.  Whenever I despond--and it comes now and then--I rebuke myself
+with this one admonition.
+
+Simply to have known him!  Admit that for a woman to find one who is
+worthy among the opposite creatures, is a happy termination of her quest,
+and in some sort dismisses her to the Shades, an uncomplaining ferry-
+bird.  If my end were at hand I should have no cause to lament it.  We
+women miss life only when we have to confess we have never met the man to
+reverence.'
+
+Emma had to hear a very great deal of Mr. Percy.  Diana's comparison of
+herself to 'the busy bee at a window-pane,' was more in her old manner;
+and her friend would have hearkened to the marvels of the gentle man less
+unrefreshed, had it not appeared to her that her Tony gave in excess for
+what was given in return.  She hinted her view.  .  .
+
+'It is expected of our sex,' Diana said.
+
+The work of busy bee at a window-pane had at any rate not spoilt her
+beauty, though she had voluntarily, profitlessly, become this man's
+drudge, and her sprightly fancy, her ready humour and darting look all
+round in discussion, were rather deadened.
+
+But the loss was not perceptible in the circle of her guests.  Present
+at a dinner little indicating the last, were Whitmonby, in lively trim
+for shuffling, dealing, cutting, trumping or drawing trumps; Westlake,
+polishing epigrams under his eyelids; Henry Wilmers, who timed an
+anecdote to strike as the passing hour without freezing the current;
+Sullivan Smith, smoked, cured and ready to flavour; Percy Dacier,
+pleasant listener, measured speaker; and young Arthur Rhodes, the
+neophyte of the hostess's training; of whom she had said to Emma, 'The
+dear boy very kindly serves to frank an unlicenced widow'; and whom she
+prompted and made her utmost of, with her natural tact.  These she mixed
+and leavened.  The talk was on high levels and low; an enchantment to
+Emma Dunstane: now a story; a question opening new routes, sharp sketches
+of known personages; a paradox shot by laughter as soon as uttered; and
+all so smoothly; not a shadow of the dominant holder-forth or a momentary
+prospect of dead flats; the mellow ring of appositeness being the
+concordant note of deliveries running linked as they flashed, and a
+tolerant philosophy of the sage in the world recurrently the keynote.
+
+Once only had Diana to protect her nurseling.  He cited a funny line
+from a recent popular volume of verse, in perfect A propos, looking at
+Sullivan Smith; who replied, that the poets had become too many for him,
+and he read none now.  Diana said: 'There are many Alexanders, but
+Alexander of Macedon is not dwarfed by the number.'  She gave him an
+opening for a smarter reply, but he lost it in a comment--against
+Whitmonby's cardinal rule: 'The neatest turn of the wrist that ever swung
+a hero to crack a crown!' and he bowed to young Rhodes: 'I 'll read your
+versicler to-morrow morning early.'  The latter expressed a fear that the
+hour was too critical for poetry.
+
+'I have taken the dose at a very early hour,' said Whitmonby, to bring
+conversation to the flow again, 'and it effaced the critical mind
+completely.'
+
+'But did not silence the critical nose,' observed Westlake.
+
+Wilmers named the owner of the longest nose in Europe.
+
+'Potentially, indeed a critic!' said Diana.
+
+'Nights beside it must be fearful, and good matter for a divorce, if the
+poor dear lady could hale it to the doors of the Vatican!' Sullivan Smith
+exclaimed.  'But there's character in noses.'
+
+'Calculable by inches?' Dacier asked.
+
+'More than in any other feature,' said Lady Dunstane.  'The Riffords are
+all prodigiously gifted and amusing: suspendens omnia naso.  It should be
+prayed for in families.'
+
+'Totum ut to faciant, Fabulle, nasum,' rejoined Whitmonby.  'Lady
+Isabella was reading the tale of the German princess, who had a sentinel
+stationed some hundred yards away to whisk off the flies, and she owned
+to me that her hand instinctively travelled upward.'
+
+'Candour is the best concealment, when one has to carry a saddle of
+absurdity,' said Diana.  'Touchstone's "poor thing, but mine own," is
+godlike in its enveloping fold.'
+
+'The most comforting sermon ever delivered on property in poverty,' said
+Arthur Rhodes.
+
+Westlake assented.  'His choice of Audrey strikes me as an exhibition of
+the sure instinct for pasture of the philosophical jester in a forest.'
+
+' With nature's woman, if he can find her, the urban seems equally at
+home,' said Lady Dunstane.
+
+'Baron Pawle is an example,' added Whitmonby.  'His cook is a pattern
+wife to him.  I heard him say at table that she was responsible for all
+except the wines.  "I wouldn't have them on my conscience, with a Judge!"
+my lady retorted.'
+
+'When poor Madame de Jacquieres was dying,' said Wilmers, 'her confessor
+sat by her bedside, prepared for his ministrations.  "Pour commencer, mon
+ami, jamais je n'ai fait rien hors nature."'
+
+Lord Wadaster had uttered something tolerably similar: 'I am a sinner,
+and in good society.'  Sir Abraham Hartiston, a minor satellite of the
+Regent, diversified this: 'I am a sinner, and go to good society.'
+Madame la Comtesse de la Roche-Aigle, the cause of many deaths, declared
+it unwomanly to fear anything save 'les revenants.'  Yet the countess
+could say the pretty thing: 'Foot on a flower, then think of me!'
+
+'Sentimentality puts up infant hands for absolution,' said Diana.
+
+'But tell me,' Lady Dunstane inquired generally, 'why men are so much
+happier than women in laughing at their spouses?'
+
+They are humaner, was one dictum; they are more frivolous, ironically
+another.
+
+'It warrants them for blowing the bugle-horn of masculine superiority
+night and morning from the castle-walls,' Diana said.
+
+'I should imagine it is for joy of heart that they still have cause to
+laugh!' said Westlake.
+
+On the other hand, are women really pained by having to laugh at their
+lords?  Curious little speeches flying about the great world, affirmed
+the contrary.  But the fair speakers were chartered libertines, and their
+laugh admittedly had a biting acid.  The parasite is concerned in the
+majesty of the tree.
+
+'We have entered Botany Bay,' Diana said to Emma; who answered: 'A
+metaphor is the Deus ex machine, of an argument'; and Whitmonby, to
+lighten a shadow of heaviness, related allusively an anecdote of the Law
+Courts.  Sullivan Smith begged permission to 'black cap' it with Judge
+FitzGerald's sentence upon a convicted criminal: 'Your plot was perfect
+but for One above.'  Dacier cited an execrable impromptu line of the
+Chief of the Opposition in Parliament.  The Premier, it was remarked,
+played him like an angler his fish on the hook; or say, Mr. Serjeant
+Rufus his witness in the box.
+
+'Or a French journalist an English missionary,' said Westlake; and as the
+instance was recent it was relished.
+
+The talk of Premiers offered Whitmonby occasion for a flight to the Court
+of Vienna and Kaunitz.  Wilmers told a droll story of Lord Busby's
+missing the Embassy there.  Westlake furnished a sample of the tranquil
+sententiousness of Busby's brother Robert during a stormy debate in the
+House of Commons.
+
+'I remember,' Dacier was reminded, 'hearing him say, when the House
+resembled a Chartist riot, "Let us stand aside and meditate on Life.  If
+Youth could know, in the season of its reaping of the Pleasures, that it
+is but sowing Doctor's bills!"'
+
+Latterly a malady had supervened, and Bob Busby had retired from the
+universal to the special;--his mysterious case.
+
+'Assure him, that is endemic.  He may be cured of his desire for the
+exposition of it,' said Lady Dunstane.
+
+Westlake chimed with her: 'Yes, the charm in discoursing of one's case is
+over when the individual appears no longer at odds with Providence.'
+
+'But then we lose our Tragedy,' said Whitmonby.
+
+'Our Comedy too,' added Diana.  'We must consent to be Busbied for the
+sake of the instructive recreations.'
+
+'A curious idea, though,' said Sullivan Smith, 'that some of the grand
+instructive figures were in their day colossal bores!'
+
+'So you see the marvel of the poet's craft at last?' Diana smiled on him,
+and he vowed: 'I'll read nothing else for a month!' Young Rhodes bade him
+beware of a deluge in proclaiming it.
+
+They rose from table at ten, with the satisfaction of knowing that
+they had not argued, had not wrangled, had never stagnated, and were
+digestingly refreshed; as it should be among grown members of the
+civilized world, who mean to practise philosophy, making the hour of
+the feast a balanced recreation and a regeneration of body and mind.
+
+'Evenings like these are worth a pilgrimage,' Emma said, embracing Tony
+outside the drawing-room door.  'I am so glad I came: and if I am strong
+enough, invite me again in the Spring.  To-morrow early I start for
+Copsley, to escape this London air.  I shall hope to have you there
+soon.'
+
+She was pleased by hearing Tony ask her whether she did not think that
+Arthur Rhodes had borne himself well; for it breathed of her simply
+friendly soul.
+
+The gentlemen followed Lady Dunstane in a troop, Dacier yielding perforce
+the last adieu to young Rhodes.
+
+Five minutes later Diana was in her dressing-room, where she wrote at
+night, on the rare occasions now when she was left free for composition.
+Beginning to dwell on THE MAN OF TWO MINDS, she glanced at the woman
+likewise divided, if not similarly; and she sat brooding.  She did not
+accuse her marriage of being the first fatal step: her error was the step
+into Society without the wherewithal to support her position there.
+Girls of her kind, airing their wings above the sphere of their birth,
+are cryingly adventuresses.  As adventuresses they are treated.
+
+Vain to be shrewish with the world!  Rather let us turn and scold our
+nature for irreflectively rushing to the cream and honey!  Had she
+subsisted on her small income in a country cottage, this task of writing
+would have been holiday.  Or better, if, as she preached to Mary Paynham,
+she had apprenticed herself to some productive craft.  The simplicity of
+the life of labour looked beautiful.  What will not look beautiful
+contrasted with the fly in the web?  She had chosen to be one of the
+flies of life.
+
+Instead of running to composition, her mind was eloquent with a sermon
+to Arthur Rhodes, in Redworth's vein; more sympathetically, of course.
+'For I am not one of the lecturing Mammonites!' she could say.
+
+She was far from that.  Penitentially, in the thick of her disdain of the
+arrogant money-Betters, she pulled out a drawer where her bank-book lay,
+and observed it contemplatively; jotting down a reflection before the
+dread book of facts was opened: 'Gaze on the moral path you should have
+taken, you are asked for courage to commit a sanctioned suicide, by
+walking back to it stripped--a skeleton self.'  She sighed forth: 'But I
+have no courage: I never had!'  The book revealed its tale in a small
+pencilled computation of the bank-clerk's; on the peccant side.  Credit
+presented many pages blanks.  She seemed to have withdrawn from the
+struggle with such a partner.
+
+It signified an immediate appeal to the usurers, unless the publisher
+could be persuaded, with three parts of the book in his hands, to come to
+the rescue.  Work! roared old Debit, the sinner turned slavedriver.
+
+Diana smoothed her wrists, compressing her lips not to laugh at the
+simulation of an attitude of combat.  She took up her pen.
+
+And strange to think, she could have flowed away at once on the stuff
+that Danvers delighted to read!--wicked princes, rogue noblemen, titled
+wantons, daisy and lily innocents, traitorous marriages, murders, a
+gallows dangling a corpse dotted by a moon, and a woman bowed beneath.
+She could have written, with the certainty that in the upper and the
+middle as well as in the lower classes of the country, there would be a
+multitude to read that stuff, so cordially, despite the gaps between
+them, are they one in their literary tastes.  And why should they not
+read it?  Her present mood was a craving for excitement; for incident,
+wild action, the primitive machinery of our species; any amount of
+theatrical heroics, pathos, and clown-gabble.  A panorama of scenes came
+sweeping round her.
+
+She was, however, harnessed to a different kind of vehicle, and had to
+drag it.  The sound of the house-door shutting, imagined perhaps, was a
+fugitive distraction.  Now to animate The Man of Two Minds!
+
+He is courting, but he is burdened with the task of tasks.  He has an
+ideal of womanhood and of the union of couples: a delicacy extreme as his
+attachment: and he must induce the lady to school herself to his ideal,
+not allowing her to suspect him less devoted to her person; while she,
+an exacting idol, will drink any quantity of idealization as long as he
+starts it from a full acceptance of her acknowledged qualities.  Diana
+could once have tripped the scene along airily.  She stared at the
+opening sentence, a heavy bit of moralized manufacture, fit to yoke
+beside that on her view of her bank-book.
+
+'It has come to this--I have no head,' she cried.
+
+And is our public likely to muster the slightest taste for comic analysis
+that does not tumble to farce?  The doubt reduced her whole MS. to a
+leaden weight, composed for sinking.  Percy's addiction to burlesque was
+a further hindrance, for she did not perceive how her comedy could be
+strained to gratify it.
+
+There was a knock, and Danvers entered.  'You have apparently a liking
+for late hours,' observed her mistress.  'I told you to go to bed.'  'It
+is Mr. Dacier,' said Danvers.  'He wishes to see me?'  'Yes, ma'am.  He
+apologized for disturbing you.'  'He must have some good reason.'  What
+could it be!  Diana's glass approved her appearance.  She pressed the
+black swell of hair above her temples, rather amazed, curious, inclined
+to a beating of the heart.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXI
+
+A CHAPTER CONTAINING GREAT POLITICAL NEWS AND THEREWITH AN INTRUSION OF
+THE LOVE-GOD
+
+Dacier was pacing about the drawing-room, as in a place too narrow for
+him.
+
+Diana stood at the door.  'Have you forgotten to tell me anything I ought
+to know?'
+
+He came up to her and shut the door softly behind her, holding her hand.
+'You are near it.  I returned .  .  But tell me first:--You were slightly
+under a shadow this evening, dejected.'
+
+'Did I show it?'
+
+She was growing a little suspicious, but this cunning touch of lover-like
+interest dispersed the shade.
+
+'To me you did.'
+
+'It was unpardonable to let it be seen.'
+
+'No one else could have observed it.'
+
+Her woman's heart was thrilled; for she had concealed the dejection from
+Emma.
+
+'It was nothing,' she said; 'a knot in the book I am writing.  We poor
+authors are worried now and then.  But you?'
+
+His face rippled by degrees brightly, to excite a reflection in hers.
+
+'Shall I tune you with good news?  I think it will excuse me for coming
+back.'
+
+'Very good news?'
+
+'Brave news, as far as it goes.'
+
+'Then it concerns you!'
+
+'Me, you, the country.'
+
+'Oh! do I guess?' cried Diana.  'But speak, pray; I burn.'
+
+'What am I to have for telling it?'
+
+'Put no price.  You know my heart.  I guess--or fancy.  It relates to
+your Chief?'
+
+Dacier smiled in a way to show the lock without the key; and she was
+insensibly drawn nearer to him, speculating on the smile.
+
+'Try again,' said he, keenly appreciating the blindness to his motive of
+her studious dark eyes, and her open-lipped breathing.
+
+'Percy!  I must be right.'
+
+'Well, you are.  He has decided!'
+
+'Oh! that is the bravest possible.  When did you hear?'
+
+'He informed me of his final decision this afternoon.'
+
+'And you were charged with the secret all the evening, and betrayed not a
+sign!  I compliment the diplomatic statesman.  But when will it be
+public?'
+
+'He calls Parliament together the first week of next month.'
+
+'The proposal is--?  No more compromises!'
+
+'Total!'
+
+Diana clapped hands; and her aspect of enthusiasm was intoxicating.
+'He is a wise man and a gallant Minister!  And while you were reading me
+through, I was blind to you,' she added meltingly.
+
+'I have not made too much of it?' said he.
+
+'Indeed you have not.'
+
+She was radiant with her dark lightnings, yet visibly subject to him
+under the spell of the news he had artfully lengthened out to excite and
+overbalance her:--and her enthusiasm was all pointed to his share in the
+altered situation, as he well knew and was flattered in knowing.
+
+'So Tony is no longer dejected?  I thought I could freshen you and get my
+excuse.'
+
+'Oh! a high wind will make a dead leaf fly like a bird.  I soar.  Now I
+do feel proud.  I have longed for it--to have you leading the country:
+not tugged at like a waggon with a treble team uphill.  We two are a
+month in advance of all England.  You stand by him?--only to hear it, for
+I am sure of it!'
+
+'We stand or fall together.'
+
+Her glowing look doated on the faithful lieutenant.
+
+'And if the henchman is my hero, I am but a waiting-woman.  But I must
+admire his leader.'
+
+'Tony!'
+
+'Ah! no,' she joined her hands, wondering whither her armed majesty had
+fled; 'no softness!  no payments!  Flatter me by letting me think you
+came to a head not a silly woman's heart, with one name on it, as it has
+not to betray.  I have been frank; you need no proofs .  .  .'  The
+supplicating hands left her figure an easy prey to the storm, and were
+crushed in a knot on her bosom.  She could only shrink.  'Ah!  Percy .  .
+you undo my praise of you--my pride in receiving you.'
+
+They were speechless perforce.
+
+'You see, Tony, my dearest, I am flesh and blood after all.'
+
+'You drive me to be ice and door-bolts!'
+
+Her eyes broke over him reproachfully.
+
+'It is not so much to grant,' he murmured.
+
+'It changes everything between us.'
+
+'Not me.  It binds me the faster.'
+
+'It makes me a loathsome hypocrite.'
+
+'But, Tony!  is it so much?'
+
+'Not if you value it low.'
+
+'But how long do you keep me in this rag-puppet's state of suspension?'
+
+'Patience.'
+
+'Dangling and swinging day and night!'
+
+'The rag-puppet shall be animated and repaid if I have life.  I wish to
+respect my hero.  Have a little mercy.  Our day will come: perhaps as
+wonderfully as this wonderful news.  My friend, drop your hands.  Have
+you forgotten who I am?  I want to think, Percy!'
+
+'But you are mine.'
+
+'You are abasing your own.'
+
+'No, by heaven!'
+
+'Worse, dear friend; you are lowering yourself to the woman who loves
+you.'
+
+'You must imagine me superhuman.'
+
+'I worship you--or did.'
+
+'Be reasonable, Tony.  What harm!  Surely a trifle of recompense?  Just
+to let me feel I live!  You own you love me.  Then I am your lover.'
+
+'My dear friend Percy, when I have consented to be your paramour, this
+kind of treatment of me will not want apologies.'
+
+The plain speaking from the wound he dealt her was effective with a
+gentleman who would never have enjoyed his privileges had he been of a
+nature unsusceptible to her distinct wish and meaning.
+
+He sighed.  'You know how my family bother me.  The woman I want, the
+only woman I could marry, I can't have.'
+
+'You have her in soul.'
+
+'Body and soul, it must be!  I believe you were made without fire.'
+
+'Perhaps.  The element is omitted with some of us happily, some think.
+Now we can converse.  There seems to be a measurement of distances
+required before men and women have a chance with their brains:--or before
+a man will understand that he can be advised and seconded.  When will the
+Cabinet be consulted?'
+
+'Oh, a few days.  Promise me .  .  .'
+
+'Any honourable promise!'
+
+'You will not keep me waiting longer than the end of the Session?'
+
+'Probably there will be an appeal to the country.'
+
+'In any case, promise me: have some compassion.'
+
+'Ah, the compassion!  You do not choose your words, Percy, or forget who
+is the speaker.'
+
+'It is Tony who forgets the time she has kept her lover dangling.
+Promise, and I will wait.'
+
+'You hurt my hand, sir.'
+
+'I could crack the knuckles.  Promise!'
+
+'Come to me to-morrow.'
+
+'To-morrow you are in your armour-triple brass!  All creation cries out
+for now.  We are mounted on barbs and you talk of ambling.'
+
+'Arthur Rhodes might have spoken that.'
+
+'Rhodes!' he shook off the name in disgust.  'Pet him as much as you
+like; don't .  .  .'  he was unable to phrase his objection.
+
+She cooled him further with eulogies of the chevaleresque manner of
+speaking which young Mr. Rhodes could assume; till for very wrath of
+blood--not jealousy: he had none of any man, with her; and not passion;
+the little he had was a fitful gust--he punished her coldness by taking
+what hastily could be gathered.
+
+Her shape was a pained submission; and she thought: Where is the woman
+who ever knows a man!--as women do think when one of their artifices of
+evasion with a lover, or the trick of imposingness, has apparently been
+subduing him.  But the pain was less than previously, for she was now
+mistress of herself, fearing no abysses.
+
+Dacier released her quickly, saying: 'If I come tomorrow, shall I have
+the promise?'
+
+She answered: 'Be sure I shall not lie.'
+
+'Why not let me have it before I go?'
+
+'My friend, to tell you the truth, you have utterly distracted me.'
+
+'Forgive me if I did hurt your hand.'
+
+'The hand?  You might strike it off.'
+
+'I can't be other than a mortal lover, Tony.  There's the fact.'
+
+'No; the fault is mine when I am degraded.  I trust you: there's the
+error.'
+
+The trial for Dacier was the sight of her quick-lifting; bosom under the
+mask of cold language: an attraction and repulsion in union; a delirium
+to any lover impelled to trample on weak defences.  But the evident pain
+he inflicted moved his pity, which helped to restore his conception of
+the beauty of her character.  She stood so nobly meek.  And she was never
+prudish, only self-respecting.  Although the great news he imparted had
+roused an ardent thirst for holiday and a dash out of harness, and he
+could hardly check it, he yielded her the lead.
+
+'Trust me you may,' he said.  'But you know--we are one.  The world has
+given you to me, me to you.  Why should we be asunder?  There's no reason
+in it.'
+
+She replied: 'But still I wish to burn a little incense in honour of
+myself, or else I cannot live.  It is the truth.  You make Death my truer
+friend, and at this moment I would willingly go out.  You would respect
+me more dead than alive.  I could better pardon you too.'
+
+He pleaded for the red mouth's pardon, remotely irritated by the
+suspicion that she swayed him overmuch: and he had deserved the small
+benevolences and donations of love, crumbs and heavenly dews!
+
+'Not a word of pardon,' said Diana.  'I shall never count an iota against
+you "in the dark backward and abysm of Time."  This news is great, and I
+have sunk beneath it.  Come tomorrow.  Then we will speak upon whatever
+you can prove rational.  The hour is getting late.'
+
+Dacier took a draught of her dark beauty with the crimson he had kindled
+over the cheeks.  Her lips were firmly closed, her eyes grave; dry, but
+seeming to waver tearfully in their heavy fulness.  He could not doubt
+her love of him; and although chafing at the idea that she swayed him
+absurdly--beyond the credible in his world of wag-tongues--he resumed his
+natural soberness, as a garment, not very uneasily fitting: whence it
+ensued--for so are we influenced by the garb we put on us--that his manly
+sentiment of revolt in being condemned to play second, was repressed by
+the refreshment breathed on him from her lofty character, the pure jewel
+proffered to his, inward ownership.
+
+'Adieu for the night,' he said, and she smiled.  He pressed for a
+pressure of her hand.  She brightened her smile instead, and said only:
+'Good night, Percy.'
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXII
+
+WHEREIN WE BEHOLD A GIDDY TURN AT THE SPECTRAL CROSSWAYS
+
+Danvers accompanied Mr. Dacier to the house-door.  Climbing the stairs,
+she found her mistress in the drawing-room still.
+
+'You must be cold, ma'am,' she said, glancing at the fire-grate.
+
+'Is it a frost?' said Diana.
+
+'It's midnight and midwinter, ma'am.'
+
+'Has it struck midnight?'
+
+The mantel-piece clock said five minutes past.
+
+'You had better go to bed, Danvers, or you will lose your bloom.  Stop;
+you are a faithful soul.  Great things are happening and I am agitated.
+Mr. Dacier has told me news.  He came back purposely.'
+
+'Yes, ma'am,' said Danvers.  'He had a great deal to tell?'
+
+'Well, he had.'  Diana coloured at the first tentative impertinence she
+had heard from her maid.  'What is the secret of you, Danvers?  What
+attaches you to me?'
+
+'I'm sure I don't know, ma'am.  I'm romantic.'
+
+'And you think me a romantic object?'
+
+'I'm sure I can't say, ma'am.  I'd rather serve you than any other lady;
+and I wish you was happy.'
+
+'Do you suppose I am unhappy?'
+
+'I'm sure--but if I may speak, ma'am: so handsome and clever a lady!
+and young!  I can't bear to see it.'
+
+'Tush, you silly woman.  You read your melting tales, and imagine.
+I must go and write for money: it is my profession.  And I haven't an
+idea in my head.  This news disturbs me.  Ruin if I don't write; so I
+must.--I can't!'
+
+Diana beheld the ruin.  She clasped the great news for succour.  Great
+indeed: and known but to her of all the outer world.  She was ahead of
+all--ahead of Mr. Tonans!
+
+The visionary figure of Mr. Tonans petrified by the great news, drinking
+it, and confessing her ahead of him in the race for secrets, arose
+toweringly.  She had not ever seen the Editor in his den at midnight.
+With the rumble of his machinery about him, and fresh matter arriving
+and flying into the printing-press, it must be like being in the very
+furnace-hissing of Events: an Olympian Council held in Vulcan's smithy.
+Consider the bringing to the Jove there news of such magnitude as to
+stupefy him!  He, too, who had admonished her rather sneeringly for
+staleness in her information.  But this news, great though it was,
+and throbbing like a heart plucked out of a breathing body, throbbed but
+for a brief term, a day or two; after which, great though it was,
+immense, it relapsed into a common organ, a possession of the multitude,
+merely historically curious.
+
+'You are not afraid of the streets at night?' Diana said to her maid, as
+they were going upstairs.
+
+'Not when we're driving, ma'am,' was the answer.
+
+THE MAN OF TWO MINDS faced his creatrix in the dressing-room, still
+delivering that most ponderous of sentences--a smothering pillow!
+
+I have mistaken my vocation, thought Diana: I am certainly the flattest
+proser who ever penned a line.
+
+She sent Dangers into the bedroom on a trifling errand, unable to bear
+the woman's proximity, and oddly unwilling to dismiss her.
+
+She pressed her hands on her eyelids.  Would Percy have humiliated her
+so if he had respected her?  He took advantage of the sudden loss of her
+habitual queenly initiative at the wonderful news to debase and stain
+their intimacy.  The lover's behaviour was judged by her sensations: she
+felt humiliated, plucked violently from the throne where she had long
+been sitting securely, very proudly.  That was at an end.  If she was to
+be better than the loathsomest of hypocrites, she must deny him his
+admission to the house.  And then what was her life!
+
+Something that was pressing her low, she knew not how, and left it
+unquestioned, incited her to exaggerate the indignity her pride had
+suffered.  She was a dethroned woman.  Deeper within, an unmasked
+actress, she said.  Oh, she forgave him!  But clearly he took her for
+the same as other women consenting to receive a privileged visitor.
+And sounding herself to the soul, was she so magnificently better?
+Her face flamed.  She hugged her arms at her breast to quiet the beating,
+and dropped them when she surprised herself embracing the memory.  He had
+brought political news, and treated her as--name the thing!  Not
+designedly, it might be: her position invited it.  'The world had given
+her to him.'  The world is always a prophet of the mire; but the world is
+no longer an utterly mistaken world.  She shook before it.
+
+She asked herself why Percy or the world should think highly of an
+adventuress, who was a denounced wife, a wretched author, and on the
+verge of bankruptcy.  She was an adventuress.  When she held The
+Crossways she had at least a bit of solid footing: now gone.  An
+adventuress without an idea in her head: witness her dullard,
+The Man of Two Minds, at his work of sermonizing his mistress.
+
+The tremendous pressure upon our consciousness of the material cause,
+when we find ourselves cast among the breakers of moral difficulties and
+endeavour to elude that mudvisaged monster, chiefly by feigning
+unconsciousness, was an experience of Diana's, in the crisis to which she
+was wrought.  Her wits were too acute, her nature too direct, to permit
+of a lengthened confusion.  She laid the scourge on her flesh smartly.
+--I gave him these privileges because I am weak as the weakest, base as
+my enemies proclaim me.  I covered my woman's vile weakness with an air
+of intellectual serenity that he, choosing his moment, tore away,
+exposing me to myself, as well as to him, the most ordinary of reptiles.
+I kept up a costly household for the sole purpose of seeing him and
+having him near me.  Hence this bitter need of money!--Either it must be
+money or disgrace.  Money would assist her quietly to amend and complete
+her work.  Yes, and this want of money, in a review of the last two
+years, was the material cause of her recklessness.  It was, her revived
+and uprising pudency declared, the principal; the only cause.  Mere want
+of money.
+
+And she had a secret worth thousands!  The secret of a day, no more:
+anybody's secret after some four and twenty hours.
+
+She smiled at the fancied elongation and stare of the features of Mr.
+Tonans in his editorial midnight den.
+
+What if he knew it and could cap it with something novel and stranger?
+Hardly.  But it was an inciting suggestion.
+
+She began to tremble as a lightning-flash made visible her fortunes
+recovered, disgrace averted, hours of peace for composition stretching
+before her: a summer afternoon's vista.
+
+It seemed a duel between herself and Mr. Tonans, and she sure of her
+triumph--Diana victrix!
+
+'Danvers!' she called.
+
+'Is it to undress, ma'am?' said the maid, entering to her.
+
+'You are not afraid of the streets, you tell me.  I have to go down to
+the City, I think.  It is urgent.  Yes, I must go.  If I were to impart
+the news to you, your head would be a tolling bell for a month.'
+
+'You will take a cab, ma'am.'
+
+'We must walk out to find one.  I must go, though I should have to go on
+foot.  Quick with bonnet and shawl; muffle up warmly.  We have never been
+out so late: but does it matter?  You're a brave soul, I'm sure, and you
+shall have your fee.'
+
+'I don't care for money, ma'am.'
+
+'When we get home you shall kiss me.'
+
+Danvers clothed her mistress in furs and rich wrappings: Not paid for!
+was Diana's desperate thought, and a wrong one; but she had to seem the
+precipitated bankrupt and succeeded.  She was near being it.  The boiling
+of her secret carried her through the streets rapidly and unobservantly
+except of such small things as the glow of the lights on the pavements
+and the hushed cognizance of the houses, in silence to a thoroughfare
+where a willing cabman was met.  The destination named, he nodded alertly
+he had driven gentlemen there at night from the House of Commons, he
+said.
+
+'Our Parliament is now sitting, and you drive ladies,' Diana replied.
+
+'I hope I know one, never mind the hour,' said he of the capes.
+
+He was bidden to drive rapidly.
+
+'Complexion a tulip: you do not often see a pale cabman,' she remarked to
+Danvers, who began laughing, as she always expected to do on an excursion
+with her mistress.
+
+'Do you remember, ma'am, the cabman taking us to the coach, when you
+thought of going to the continent?'
+
+'And I went to The Crossways?  I have forgotten him.'
+
+'He declared you was so beautiful a lady he would drive you to the end of
+England for nothing.'
+
+'It must have been when I was paying him.  Put it out of your mind,
+Danvers, that there are individual cabmen.  They are the painted flowers
+of our metropolitan thoroughfares, and we gather them in rows.'
+
+'They have their feelings, ma'am.'
+
+'Brandied feelings are not pathetic to me.'
+
+'I like to think kindly of them,' Danvers remarked, in reproof of her
+inhumanity; adding: 'They may overturn us!' at which Diana laughed.
+Her eyes were drawn to a brawl of women and men in the street.  'Ah!
+that miserable sight!' she cried.  'It is the everlasting nightmare of
+London.'
+
+Danvers humped, femininely injured by the notice of it.  She wondered her
+mistress should deign to.
+
+Rolling on between the blind and darkened houses, Diana transferred her
+sensations to them, and in a fit of the nerves imagined them beholding a
+funeral convoy without followers.
+
+They came in view of the domed cathedral, hearing, in a pause of the
+wheels, the bell of the hour.  'Faster--faster!  my dear man,' Diana
+murmured, and they entered a small still square of many lighted windows.
+
+'This must be where the morrow is manufactured,' she said.  'Tell the man
+to wait.--Or rather it's the mirror of yesterday: we have to look
+backward to see forward in life.'
+
+She talked her cool philosophy to mask her excitement from herself.
+Her card, marked: 'Imperative-two minutes,' was taken up to Mr. Tonans.
+They ascended to the editorial ante-room.  Doors opened and shut, hasty
+feet traversed the corridors, a dull hum in dumbness told of mighty
+business at work.  Diana received the summons to the mighty head of the
+establishment.  Danvers was left to speculate.  She heard the voice of
+Mr. Tonans: 'Not more than two!'  This was not a place for compliments.
+Men passed her, hither and yonder, cursorily noticing the presence of a
+woman.  She lost, very strangely to her, the sense of her sex and became
+an object--a disregarded object.  Things of more importance were about.
+Her feminine self-esteem was troubled; all idea of attractiveness
+expired.  Here was manifestly a spot where women had dropped from the
+secondary to the cancelled stage of their extraordinary career in a world
+either blowing them aloft like soap-bubbles or quietly shelving them as
+supernumeraries.  A gentleman--sweet vision!--shot by to the editor's
+door, without even looking cursorily.  He knocked.  Mr. Tonans appeared
+and took him by the arm, dictating at a great rate; perceived Danvers,
+frowned at the female, and requested him to wait in the room, which the
+gentleman did, not once casting eye upon a woman.  At last her mistress
+returned to her, escorted so far by Mr. Tonans, and he refreshingly bent
+his back to bow over her hand: so we have the satisfaction of knowing
+that we are not such poor creatures after all!  Suffering in person,
+Danvers was revived by the little show of homage to her sex.
+
+They descended the stairs.
+
+'You are not an Editor of a paper, but you may boast that you have been
+near the nest of one,' Diana said, when they resumed their seats in the
+cab.  She breathed deeply from time to time, as if under a weight, or
+relieved of it, but she seemed animated, and she dropped now and again a
+funny observation of the kind that tickled Danvers and caused the maid to
+boast of her everywhere as better than a Play.
+
+At home, Danvers busied her hands to supply her mistress a cup of
+refreshing tea and a plate of biscuits.
+
+Diana had stunned herself with the strange weight of the expedition, and
+had not a thought.  In spite of tea at that hour, she slept soundly
+through the remainder of the night, dreamlessly till late into the
+morning.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIII
+
+EXHIBITS THE SPRINGING OF A MINE IN A NEWSPAPER ARTICLE
+
+The powers of harmony would seem to be tried to their shrewdest pitch
+when Politics and Love are planted together in a human breast.  This
+apparently opposite couple can nevertheless chant a very sweet accord,
+as was shown by Dacier on his homeward walk from Diana's house.  Let Love
+lead, the God will make music of any chamber-comrade.  He was able to
+think of affairs of State while feeling the satisfied thirst of the lover
+whose pride, irritated by confidential wild eulogies of the beautiful
+woman, had recently clamoured for proofs of his commandership.  The
+impression she stamped on him at Copsley remained, but it could not
+occupy the foreground for ever.  He did not object to play second to her
+sprightly wits in converse, if he had some warm testimony to his mastery
+over her blood.  For the world had given her to him, enthusiastic friends
+had congratulated him: she had exalted him for true knightliness; and he
+considered the proofs well earned, though he did not value them low.
+They were little by comparison.  They lighted, instead of staining, her
+unparalleled high character.
+
+She loved him.  Full surely did she love him, or such a woman would never
+have consented to brave the world; once in their project of flight, and
+next, even more endearingly when contemplated, in the sacrifice of her
+good name; not omitting that fervent memory of her pained submission,
+but a palpitating submission, to his caress.  She was in his arms again
+at the thought of it.  He had melted her, and won the confession of her
+senses by a surprise, and he owned that never had woman been so
+vigilantly self-guarded or so watchful to keep her lover amused and
+aloof.  Such a woman deserved long service.  But then the long service
+deserved its time of harvest.  Her surging look of reproach in submission
+pointed to the golden time, and as he was a man of honour, pledged to her
+for life, he had no remorse, and no scruple in determining to exact her
+dated promise, on this occasion deliberately.  She was the woman to be
+his wife; she was his mind's mate: they had hung apart in deference to
+mere scruples too long.  During the fierce battle of the Session she
+would be his help, his fountain of counsel; and she would be the rosy
+gauze-veiled more than cold helper and adviser, the being which would
+spur her womanly intelligence to acknowledge, on this occasion
+deliberately, the wisdom of the step.  They had been so close to it!
+She might call it madness then: now it was wisdom.  Each had complete
+experience of the other, and each vowed the step must be taken.
+As to the secret communicated, he exulted in the pardonable cunning of
+the impulse turning him back to her house after the guests had gone, and
+the dexterous play of his bait on the line, tempting her to guess and
+quit her queenly guard.  Though it had not been distinctly schemed, the
+review of it in that light added to the enjoyment.  It had been dimly and
+richly conjectured as a hoped result.  Small favours from her were really
+worth, thrice worth, the utmost from other women.  They tasted the
+sweeter for the winning of them artfully--an honourable thing in love.
+Nature, rewarding the lover's ingenuity and enterprise, inspires him
+with old Greek notions of right and wrong: and love is indeed a fluid
+mercurial realm, continually shifting the principles of rectitude and
+larceny.  As long as he means nobly, what is there to condemn him?  Not
+she in her heart.  She was the presiding divinity.
+
+And she, his Tony, that splendid Diana, was the woman the world abused!
+Whom will it not abuse?
+
+The slough she would have to plunge in before he could make her his own
+with the world's consent, was already up to her throat.  She must, and
+without further hesitation, be steeped, that he might drag her out,
+washed of the imputed defilement, and radiant, as she was in character.
+Reflection now said this; not impulse.  Her words rang through him.
+At every meeting she said things to confound his estimate of the wits of
+women, or be remembered for some spirited ring they had: A high wind will
+make a dead leaf fly like a bird.  He murmured it and flew with her.
+She quickened a vein of imagination that gave him entrance to a strangely
+brilliant sphere, above his own, where, she sustaining, he too could
+soar; and he did, scarce conscious of walking home, undressing, falling
+asleep.
+
+The act of waking was an instantaneous recovery of his emotional rapture
+of the overnight; nor was it a bar to graver considerations.  His Chief
+had gone down to a house in the country; his personal business was to see
+and sound the followers of their party--after another sight of his Tony.
+She would be sure to counsel sagaciously; she always did.  She had a
+marvellous intuition of the natures of the men he worked with, solely
+from his chance descriptions of them; it was as though he started the
+bird and she transfixed it.  And she should not have matter to rule her
+smooth brows: that he swore to.  She should sway him as she pleased, be
+respected after her prescribed manner.  The promise must be exacted;
+nothing besides, promise.--You see, Tony, you cannot be less than Tony to
+me now, he addressed the gentle phantom of her.  Let me have your word,
+and I am your servant till the Session ends.--Tony blushes her swarthy
+crimson: Diana, fluttering, rebukes her; but Diana is the appeasable
+Goddess; Tony is the woman, and she loves him.  The glorious Goddess need
+not cut them adrift; they can show her a book of honest pages.
+
+Dacier could truthfully say he had worshipped, done knightly service to
+the beloved woman, homage to the aureole encircling her.  Those friends
+of his, covertly congratulating him on her preference, doubtless thought
+him more privileged than he was; but they did not know Diana; and they
+were welcome, if they would only believe, to the knowledge that he was
+at the feet of this most sovereign woman.  He despised the particular
+Satyr-world which, whatever the nature or station of the woman, crowns
+the desecrator, and bestows the title of Fool on the worshipper.  He
+could have answered veraciously that she had kept him from folly.
+
+Nevertheless the term to service must come.  In the assurance of the
+approaching term he stood braced against a blowing world; happy as men
+are when their muscles are strung for a prize they pluck with the energy
+and aim of their whole force.
+
+Letters and morning papers were laid for him to peruse in his dressing-
+room.  He read his letters before the bath.  Not much public news was
+expected at the present season.  While dressing, he turned over the
+sheets of Whitmonby's journal.  Dull comments on stale things.  Foreign
+news.  Home news, with the leaders on them, identically dull.  Behold the
+effect of Journalism: a witty man, sparkling overnight, gets into his
+pulpit and proses; because he must say something, and he really knows
+nothing.
+
+Journalists have an excessive overestimate of their influence.  They
+cannot, as Diana said, comparing them with men on the Parliamentary
+platform, cannot feel they are aboard the big vessel; they can only
+strive to raise a breeze, or find one to swell; and they cannot measure
+the stoutness or the greatness of the good ship England.  Dacier's
+personal ambition was inferior to his desire to extend and strengthen his
+England.  Parliament was the field, Government the office.  How many
+conversations had passed between him and Diana on that patriotic dream!
+She had often filled his drooping sails; he owned it proudly:--and while
+the world, both the hoofed and the rectilinear portions, were biting at
+her character!  Had he fretted her self-respect?  He blamed himself, but
+a devoted service must have its term.
+
+The paper of Mr. Tonans was reserved for perusal at breakfast.  He
+reserved it because Tonans was an opponent, tricksy and surprising now
+and then, amusing too; unlikely to afford him serious reflections.  The
+recent endeavours of his journal to whip the Government-team to a right-
+about-face were annoying, preposterous.  Dacier had admitted to Diana
+that Tonans merited the thanks of the country during 'the discreditable
+Railway mania, when his articles had a fine exhortative and prophetic
+twang, and had done marked good.  Otherwise, as regarded the Ministry,
+the veering gusts of Tonans were objectionable: he 'raised the breeze'
+wantonly as well as disagreeably.  Any one can whip up the populace if he
+has the instruments; and Tonans frequently intruded on the Ministry's
+prerogative to govern.  The journalist was bidding against the statesman.
+But such is the condition of a rapidly Radicalizing country!  We must
+take it as it is.
+
+With a complacent, What now, Dacier fixed his indifferent eyes on the
+first column of the leaders.  He read, and his eyes grew horny.  He
+jerked back at each sentence, electrified, staring.  The article was
+shorter than usual.  Total Repeal was named; the precise date when the
+Minister intended calling Parliament together to propose it.  The 'Total
+Repeal' might be guess-work--an Editor's bold stroke; but the details,
+the date, were significant of positive information.  The Minister's
+definite and immediate instructions were exactly stated.
+
+Where could the fellow have got hold of that?  Dacier asked the blank
+ceiling.
+
+He frowned at vacant corners of the room in an effort to conjure some
+speculation indicative of the source.
+
+Had his Chief confided the secret to another and a traitor?  Had they
+been overheard in his library when the project determined on was put in
+plain speech?
+
+The answer was no, impossible, to each question.
+
+He glanced at Diana.  She?  But it was past midnight when he left her.
+And she would never have betrayed him, never, never.  To imagine it a
+moment was an injury to her.
+
+Where else could he look?  It had been specially mentioned in the
+communication as a secret by his Chief, who trusted him and no others.
+Up to the consultation with the Cabinet, it was a thing to be guarded
+like life itself.  Not to a soul except Diana would Dacier have breathed
+syllable of any secret--and one of this weight!
+
+He ran down the article again.  There were the facts; undeniable facts;
+and they detonated with audible roaring and rounding echoes of them over
+England.  How did they come there?  As well inquire how man came on the,
+face of the earth.
+
+He had to wipe his forehead perpetually.  Think as he would in exaltation
+of Diana to shelter himself, he was the accused.  He might not be the
+guilty, but he had opened his mouth; and though it was to her only, and
+she, as Dunstane had sworn, true as steel, he could not escape
+condemnation.  He had virtually betrayed his master.  Diana would never
+betray her lover, but the thing was in the air as soon as uttered: and
+off to the printing-press!  Dacier's grotesque fancy under annoyance
+pictured a stream of small printer's devils in flight from his babbling
+lips.
+
+He consumed bits of breakfast, with a sour confession that a newspaper-
+article had hit him at last, and stunningly.
+
+Hat and coat were called for.  The state of aimlessness in hot perplexity
+demands a show of action.  Whither to go first was as obscure as what to
+do.  Diana said of the Englishman's hat and coat, that she supposed they
+were to make him a walking presentment of the house he had shut up behind
+him.  A shot of the eye at the glass confirmed the likeness, but with a
+ruefully wry-faced repudiation of it internally:--Not so shut up! the
+reverse of that-a common babbler.
+
+However, there was no doubt of Diana.  First he would call on her.  The
+pleasantest dose in perturbations of the kind is instinctively taken
+first.  She would console, perhaps direct him to guess how the secret had
+leaked.  But so suddenly, immediately!  It was inexplicable.
+
+Sudden and immediate consequences were experienced.  On the steps of his
+house his way was blocked by the arrival of Mr. Quintin Manx, who jumped
+out of a cab, bellowing interjections and interrogations in a breath.
+Was there anything in that article?  He had read it at breakfast, and it
+had choked him.  Dacier was due at a house and could not wait: he said,
+rather sharply, he was not responsible for newspaper articles.  Quintin
+Manx, a senior gentleman and junior landowner, vowed that no Minister
+intending to sell the country should treat him as a sheep.  The shepherd
+might go; he would not carry his flock with him.  But was there a twinkle
+of probability in the story?  .  .  .  that article!  Dacier was unable
+to inform him; he was very hurried, had to keep an appointment.
+
+'If I let you go, will you come and lunch with me at two?' said Quintin.
+
+To get rid of him, Dacier nodded and agreed.
+
+'Two o'clock, mind!' was bawled at his heels as he walked off with his
+long stride, unceremoniously leaving the pursy gentleman of sixty to
+settle with his cabman far to the rear.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIV
+
+IN WHICH IT IS DARKLY SEEN HOW THE CRIMINAL'S JUDGE MAY BE LOVE'S
+CRIMINAL
+
+When we are losing balance on a precipice we do not think much of the
+thing we have clutched for support.  Our balance is restored and we have
+not fallen; that is the comfortable reflection: we stand as others do,
+and we will for the future be warned to avoid the dizzy stations which
+cry for resources beyond a common equilibrium, and where a slip
+precipitates us to ruin.
+
+When, further, it is a woman planted in a burning blush, having to
+idealize her feminine weakness, that she may not rebuke herself for
+grovelling, the mean material acts by which she sustains a tottering
+position are speedily swallowed in the one pervading flame.  She sees
+but an ashen curl of the path she has traversed to safety, if anything.
+
+Knowing her lover was to come in the morning, Diana's thoughts dwelt
+wholly upon the way to tell him, as tenderly as possible without danger
+to herself, that her time for entertaining was over until she had
+finished her book; indefinitely, therefore.  The apprehension of his
+complaining pricked the memory that she had something to forgive.  He had
+sunk her in her own esteem by compelling her to see her woman's softness.
+But how high above all other men her experience of him could place him
+notwithstanding!  He had bowed to the figure of herself, dearer than
+herself, that she set before him: and it was a true figure to the world;
+a too fictitious to any but the most knightly of lovers.  She forgave;
+and a shudder seized her.--Snake!  she rebuked the delicious run of fire
+through her veins; for she vas not like the idol women of imperishable
+type, who are never for a twinkle the prey of the blood: statues created
+by man's common desire to impress upon the sex his possessing pattern of
+them as domestic decorations.
+
+When she entered the room to Dacier and they touched hands, she rejoiced
+in her coolness, without any other feeling or perception active.  Not to
+be unkind, not too kind: this was her task.  She waited for the passage
+of commonplaces.
+
+'You slept well, Percy?'
+
+'Yes; and you?'
+
+'I don't think I even dreamed.'
+
+They sat.  She noticed the cloud on him and waited for his allusion to
+it, anxious concerning him simply.
+
+Dacier flung the hair off his temples.  Words of Titanic formation were
+hurling in his head at journals and journalists.  He muttered his disgust
+of them.
+
+'Is there anything to annoy you in the papers to-day?' she asked, and
+thought how handsome his face was in anger.
+
+The paper of Mr. Tonans was named by him.  'You have not seen it?
+
+'I have not opened it yet.'
+
+He sprang up.  'The truth is, those fellows can now afford to buy right
+and left, corrupt every soul alive!  There must have been a spy at the
+keyhole.  I'm pretty certain--I could swear it was not breathed to any
+ear but mine; and there it is this morning in black and white.'
+
+'What is?' cried Diana, turning to him on her chair.
+
+'The thing I told you last night.'
+
+Her lips worked, as if to spell the thing.  'Printed, do you say?' she
+rose.
+
+'Printed.  In a leading article, loud as a trumpet; a hue and cry running
+from end to end of the country.  And my Chief has already had the
+satisfaction of seeing the secret he confided to me yesterday roared in
+all the thoroughfares this morning.  They've got the facts: his decision
+to propose it, and the date--the whole of it!  But who could have
+betrayed it?'
+
+For the first time since her midnight expedition she felt a sensation of
+the full weight of the deed.  She heard thunder.
+
+She tried to disperse the growing burden by an inward summons to contempt
+of the journalistic profession, but nothing would come.  She tried to
+minimize it, and her brain succumbed.  Her views of the deed last night
+and now throttled reason in two contending clutches.  The enormity
+swelled its dimensions, taking shape, and pointing magnetically at her.
+She stood absolutely, amazedly, bare before it.
+
+'Is it of such very great importance?' she said, like one supplicating
+him to lessen it.
+
+'A secret of State?  If you ask whether it is of great importance to me,
+relatively it is of course.  Nothing greater.  Personally my conscience
+is clear.  I never mentioned it--couldn't have mentioned it--to any one
+but you.  I'm not the man to blab secrets.  He spoke to me because he
+knew he could trust me.  To tell you the truth, I'm brought to a dead
+stop.  I can't make a guess.
+
+I'm certain, from what he said, that he trusted me only with it:
+perfectly certain.  I know him well.  He was in his library, speaking in
+his usual conversational tone, deliberately, nor overloud.  He stated
+that it was a secret between us.'
+
+'Will it affect him?'
+
+'This article?  Why, naturally it will.  You ask strange questions.  A
+Minister coming to a determination like that!  It affects him vitally.
+The members of the Cabinet are not so devoted .  .  .  .  It affects us
+all--the whole Party; may split it to pieces!  There's no reckoning the
+upset right and left.  If it were false, it could be refuted; we could
+despise it as a trick of journalism.  It's true.  There's the mischief.
+Tonans did not happen to call here last night?--absurd!  I left later
+than twelve.'
+
+'No, but let me hear,' Diana said hurriedly, for the sake of uttering the
+veracious negative and to slur it over.  'Let me hear .  .  .'  She could
+not muster an idea.
+
+Her delicious thrilling voice was a comfort to him.  He lifted his breast
+high and thumped it, trying to smile.  'After all, it's pleasant being
+with you, Tony.  Give me your hand--you may: I 'm bothered--confounded by
+this morning surprise.  It was like walking against the muzzle of a
+loaded cannon suddenly unmasked.  One can't fathom the mischief it will
+do.  And I shall be suspected, and can't quite protest myself the
+spotless innocent.  Not even to my heart's mistress!  to the wife of the
+bosom!  I suppose I'm no Roman.  You won't give me your hand?  Tony, you
+might, seeing I am rather .  .  .'
+
+A rush of scalding tears flooded her eyes.
+
+'Don't touch me,' she said, and forced her sight to look straight at him
+through the fiery shower.  'I have done positive mischief?'
+
+'You, my dear Tony?' He doated on her face.  'I don't blame you, I blame
+myself.  These things should never be breathed.  Once in the air, the
+devil has hold of them.  Don't take it so much to heart.  The thing's bad
+enough to bear as it is.  Tears!  Let me have the hand.  I came, on my
+honour, with the most honest intention to submit to your orders: but if I
+see you weeping in sympathy!'
+
+'Oh!  for heaven's sake,' she caught her hands away from him, 'don't be
+generous.  Whip me with scorpions.  And don't touch me,' cried Diana.
+'Do you understand?  You did not name it as a secret.  I did not imagine
+it to be a secret of immense, immediate importance.'
+
+'But--what?' shouted Dacier, stiffening.
+
+He wanted her positive meaning, as she perceived, having hoped that it
+was generally taken and current, and the shock to him over.
+
+'I had .  .  .  I had not a suspicion of doing harm, Percy.'
+
+'But what harm have you done?  No riddles!'
+
+His features gave sign of the break in their common ground, the widening
+gulf.
+
+'I went .  .  .  it was a curious giddiness: I can't account for it.  I
+thought .  .  .'
+
+'Went?  You went where?'
+
+'Last night.  I would speak intelligibly: my mind has gone.  Ah! you
+look.  It is not so bad as my feeling.'
+
+'But where did you go last night?  What!--to Tonans?'
+
+She drooped her head: she saw the track of her route cleaving the
+darkness in a demoniacal zig-zag and herself in demon's grip.
+
+'Yes,' she confronted him.  'I went to Mr. Tonans.'
+
+'Why?'
+
+'I went to him--'
+
+'You went alone?'
+
+'I took my maid.'
+
+'Well?'
+
+'It was late when you left me .  .  .'
+
+'Speak plainly!'
+
+'I am trying: I will tell you all.'
+
+'At once, if you please.'
+
+'I went to him--why?  There is no accounting for it.  He sneered
+constantly at my stale information.'
+
+'You gave him constant information?'
+
+'No: in our ordinary talk.  He railed at me for being "out of it."  I
+must be childish: I went to show him--oh! my vanity!  I think I must have
+been possessed.'
+
+She watched the hardening of her lover's eyes.  They penetrated, and
+through them she read herself insufferably.
+
+But it was with hesitation still that he said: 'Then you betrayed me?'
+
+'Percy!  I had not a suspicion of mischief.'
+
+'You went straight to this man?'
+
+'Not thinking .  .  .'
+
+'You sold me to a journalist!'
+
+'I thought it was a secret of a day.  I don't think you--no, you did not
+tell me to keep it secret.  A word from you would have been enough.  I
+was in extremity.'
+
+Dacier threw his hands up and broke away.  He had an impulse to dash from
+the room, to get a breath of different air.  He stood at the window,
+observing tradesmen's carts, housemaids, blank doors, dogs, a beggar
+fifer.  Her last words recurred to him.  He turned: 'You were in
+extremity, you said.  What is the meaning of that?  What extremity?'
+
+Her large dark eyes flashed powerlessly; her shape appeared to have
+narrowed; her tongue, too, was a feeble penitent.
+
+'You ask a creature to recall her acts of insanity.'
+
+'There must be some signification in your words, I suppose.'
+
+'I will tell you as clearly as I can.  You have the right to be my judge.
+I was in extremity--that is, I saw no means .  .  .  I could not write:
+it was ruin coming.'
+
+'Ah?--you took payment for playing spy?'
+
+'I fancied I could retrieve .  .  .  Now I see the folly, the baseness.
+I was blind.'
+
+'Then you sold me to a journalist for money?'
+
+The intolerable scourge fetched a stifled scream from her and drove her
+pacing, but there was no escape; she returned to meet it.
+
+The room was a cage to both of them, and every word of either was a
+sting.
+
+'Percy, I did not imagine he would use it--make use of it as he has
+done.'
+
+'Not?  And when he paid for it?'
+
+'I fancied it would be merely of general service--if any.'
+
+'Distributed; I see: not leading to the exposure of the communicant!'
+
+'You are harsh; but I would not have you milder.'
+
+The meekness of such a mischief-doer was revolting and called for the
+lash.
+
+'Do me the favour to name the sum.  I am curious to learn what my
+imbecility was counted worth.'
+
+'No sum was named.'
+
+'Have I been bought for a song?'
+
+'It was a suggestion--no definite . . .  nothing stipulated.'
+
+'You were to receive money!'
+
+'Leave me a bit of veiling!  No, you shall behold me the thing I am.
+Listen .  .  .  I was poor .  .  .'
+
+'You might have applied to me.'
+
+'For money!  That I could not do:
+
+'Better than betraying me, believe me.'
+
+'I had no thought of betraying.  I hope I could have died rather than
+consciously betray.'
+
+'Money!  My whole fortune was at your, disposal.'
+
+'I was beset with debts, unable to write, and, last night when you left
+me, abject.  It seemed to me that you disrespected me .  .  .'
+
+'Last night!'  Dacier cried with lashing emphasis.
+
+'It is evident to me that I have the reptile in me, Percy.  Or else I am
+subject to lose my reason.  I went .  .  .  I went like a bullet: I
+cannot describe it; I was mad.  I need a strong arm, I want help.  I am
+given to think that I do my best and can be independent; I break down.
+I went blindly--now I see it--for the chance of recovering my position,
+as the gambler casts; and he wins or loses.  With me it is the soul that
+is lost.  No exact sum was named; thousands were hinted.'
+
+'You are hardly practical on points of business.'
+
+'I was insane.'
+
+'I think you said you slept well after it,' Dacier remarked.
+
+'I had so little the idea of having done evilly, that I slept without a
+dream.'
+
+He shrugged:--the consciences of women are such smooth deeps, or running
+shallows.
+
+'I have often wondered how your newspaper men got their information,' he
+said, and muttered: 'Money-women!' adding: 'Idiots to prime them!  And I
+one of the leaky vessels!  Well, we learn.  I have been rather astonished
+at times of late at the scraps of secret knowledge displayed by Tonans.
+If he flourishes his thousands!  The wonder is, he doesn't corrupt the
+Ministers' wives.  Perhaps he does.  Marriage will become a danger-sign
+to Parliamentary members.  Foreign women do these tricks .  .  .  women
+of a well-known stamp.  It is now a full year, I think, since I began to
+speak to you of secret matters--and congratulated myself, I recollect,
+on your thirst for them.'
+
+'Percy, if you suspect that I have uttered one word before last night,
+you are wrong.  I cannot paint my temptation or my loss of sense last
+night.  Previously I was blameless.  I thirsted, yes; but in the hope of
+helping you.'
+
+He looked at her.  She perceived how glitteringly loveless his eyes had
+grown.  It was her punishment; and though the enamoured woman's heart
+protested it excessive, she accepted it.
+
+'I can never trust you again,' he said.
+
+'I fear you will not,' she replied.
+
+His coming back to her after the departure of the guests last night shone
+on him in splendid colours of single-minded loverlike devotion.  'I came
+to speak to my own heart.  I thought it would give you pleasure; thought
+I could trust you utterly.  I had not the slightest conception I was
+imperilling my honour .  .  .  !'
+
+He stopped.  Her bloodless fixed features revealed an intensity of
+anguish that checked him.  Only her mouth, a little open for the sharp
+breath, appeared dumbly beseeching.  Her large eyes met his like steel to
+steel, as of one who would die fronting the weapon.
+
+He strangled a loathsome inclination to admire.
+
+'So good bye,' he said.
+
+She moved her lips.
+
+He said no more.  In half a minute he was gone.
+
+To her it was the plucking of life out of her breast.
+
+She pressed her hands where heart had been.  The pallor and cold of death
+took her body.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXV
+
+REVEALS HOW THE TRUE HEROINE OF ROMANCE COMES FINALLY TO HER, TIME OF
+TRIUMPH
+
+The shutting of her house-door closed for Dacier that woman's history in
+connection with himself.  He set his mind on the consequences of the act
+of folly--the trusting a secret to a woman.  All were possibly not so
+bad: none should be trusted.
+
+The air of the street fanned him agreeably as he revolved the horrible
+project of confession to the man who had put faith in him.  Particulars
+might be asked.  She would be unnamed, but an imagination of the effect
+of naming her placarded a notorious woman in fresh paint: two members of
+the same family her victims!
+
+And last night, no later than last night, he had swung round at this very
+corner of the street to give her the fullest proof of his affection.  He
+beheld a dupe trotting into a carefully-laid pitfall.  She had him by the
+generosity of his confidence in her.  Moreover, the recollection of her
+recent feeble phrasing, when she stood convicted of the treachery, when a
+really clever woman would have developed her resources, led him to doubt
+her being so finely gifted.  She was just clever enough to hoodwink.  He
+attributed the dupery to a trick of imposing the idea of her virtue upon
+men.  Attracted by her good looks and sparkle, they entered the circle of
+her charm, became delightfully intimate, suffered a rebuff, and were from
+that time prepared to serve her purpose.  How many other wretched dupes
+had she dangling?  He spied at Westlake, spied at Redworth, at old Lord
+Larrian, at Lord Dannisburgh, at Arthur Rhodes, dozens.  Old and young
+were alike to her if she saw an end to be gained by keeping them hooked.
+Tonans too, and Whitmonby.  Newspaper editors were especially
+serviceable.  Perhaps 'a young Minister of State' held the foremost rank
+in that respect: if completely duped and squeezeable, he produced more
+substantial stuff.
+
+The background of ice in Dacier's composition was brought to the front by
+his righteous contempt of her treachery.  No explanation of it would have
+appeased him.  She was guilty, and he condemned her.  She stood condemned
+by all the evil likely to ensue from her misdeed.  Scarcely had he left
+her house last night when she was away to betray him!--He shook her from
+him without a pang.  Crediting her with the one merit she had--that of
+not imploring for mercy--he the more easily shook her off.  Treacherous,
+she had not proved theatrical.  So there was no fuss in putting out her
+light, and it was done.  He was justified by the brute facts.
+Honourable, courteous, kindly gentleman, highly civilized, an excellent
+citizen and a patriot, he was icy at an outrage to his principles, and in
+the dominion of Love a sultan of the bow-string and chopper period,
+sovereignly endowed to stretch a finger for the scimitared Mesrour to
+make the erring woman head and trunk with one blow: and away with those
+remnants!  This internally he did.  Enough that the brute facts justified
+him.
+
+St. James's park was crossed, and the grass of the Green park, to avoid
+inquisitive friends.  He was obliged to walk; exercise, action of any
+sort, was imperative, and but for some engagement he would have gone to
+his fencing-rooms for a bout with the master.  He remembered his
+engagement and grew doubly embittered.  He had absurdly pledged himself
+to lunch with Quintin Manx; that was, to pretend to eat while submitting
+to be questioned by a political dullard strong on his present right to
+overhaul and rail at his superiors.  The house was one of a block along
+the North-Western line of Hyde park.  He kicked at the subjection to go
+there, but a promise was binding, though he gave it when stunned.  He
+could have silenced Mr. Manx with the posing interrogation: Why have I so
+long consented to put myself at the mercy of a bore?  For him, he could
+not answer it, though Manx, as leader of the Shipping interest, was
+influential.  The man had to be endured, like other doses in politics.
+
+Dacier did not once think of the great ship-owner's niece till Miss
+Constance Asper stepped into her drawing-room to welcome him.  She was an
+image of repose to his mind.  The calm pure outline of her white features
+refreshed him as the Alps the Londoner newly alighted at Berne; smoke,
+wrangle, the wrestling city's wickedness, behind him.
+
+'My uncle is very disturbed,' she said.  'Is the news--if I am not very
+indiscreet in inquiring?'
+
+'I have a practice of never paying attention to newspaper articles,'
+Dacier replied.
+
+'I am only affected by living with one who does,' Miss Asper observed,
+and the lofty isolation of her head above politics gave her a moral
+attractiveness in addition to physical beauty.  Her water-colour sketches
+were on her uncle's walls: the beautiful in nature claimed and absorbed
+her.  She dressed with a pretty rigour, a lovely simplicity, picturesque
+of the nunnery.  She looked indeed a high-born young lady-abbess.
+
+'It's a dusty game for ladies,' Dacier said, abhorring the women defiled
+by it.
+
+And when one thinks of the desire of men to worship women, there is a
+pathos in a man's discovery of the fair young creature undefiled by any
+interest in public affairs, virginal amid her bower's environments.
+
+The angelical beauty of a virgin mind and person captivated him, by
+contrast.  His natural taste was to admire it, shunning the lures and
+tangles of the women on high seas, notably the married: who, by the way,
+contrive to ensnare us through wonderment at a cleverness caught from
+their traffic with the masculine world: often--if we did but know!--
+a parrot-repetition of the last male visitor's remarks.  But that which
+the fair maiden speaks, though it may be simple, is her own.
+
+She too is her own: or vowed but to one.  She is on all sides impressive
+in purity.  The world worships her as its perfect pearl: and we are
+brought refreshfully to acknowledge that the world is right.
+
+By contrast, the white radiation of Innocence distinguished Constance
+Asper celestially.  As he was well aware, she had long preferred him--
+the reserved among many pleading pressing suitors.  Her steady
+faithfulness had fed on the poorest crumbs.
+
+He ventured to express the hope that she was well.
+
+'Yes,' she answered, with eyelids lifted softly to thank him for his
+concern in so humble a person.
+
+'You look a little pale,' he said.
+
+She coloured like a sea-water shell.  'I am inclined to paleness by
+nature.'
+
+Her uncle disturbed them.  Lunch was ready.  He apologized for the
+absence of Mrs. Markland, a maternal aunt of Constance, who kept house
+for them.  Quintin Manx fell upon the meats, and then upon the Minister.
+Dacier found himself happily surprised by the accession of an appetite.
+He mentioned it, to escape from the worrying of his host, as unusual with
+him at midday: and Miss Asper, supporting him in that effort, said
+benevolently: 'Gentlemen should eat; they have so many fatigues and
+troubles.'  She herself did not like to be seen eating in public.  Her
+lips opened to the morsels, as with a bird's bill, though with none of
+the pecking eagerness we complacently observe in poultry.
+
+'But now, I say, positively, how about that article?' said Quintin.
+
+Dacier visibly winced, and Constance immediately said 'Oh!  spare us
+politics, dear uncle.'
+
+Her intercession was without avail, but by contrast with the woman
+implicated in the horrible article, it was a carol of the seraphs.
+
+'Come, you can say whether there's anything in it,' Dacier's host pushed
+him.
+
+'I should not say it if I could,' he replied.
+
+The mild sweetness of Miss Asper's look encouraged him.
+
+He was touched to the quick by hearing her say: 'You ask for Cabinet
+secrets, uncle.  All secrets are holy, but secrets of State are under a
+seal next to divine.'
+
+Next to divine!  She was the mouthpiece of his ruling principle.
+
+'I 'm not, prying into secrets,' Quintin persisted; 'all I want to know
+is, whether there 's any foundation for that article--all London's
+boiling about it, I can tell you--or it's only newspaper's humbug.'
+
+'Clearly the oracle for you is the Editor's office,' rejoined Dacier.
+
+'A pretty sort of answer I should get.'
+
+'It would at least be complimentary.'
+
+'How do you mean?'
+
+'The net was cast for you--and the sight of a fish in it!'
+
+Miss Asper almost laughed.  'Have you heard the choir at St.
+Catherine's?' she asked.
+
+Dacier had not.  He repented of his worldliness, and drinking persuasive
+claret, said he would go to hear it next Sunday.
+
+'Do,' she murmured.
+
+'Well, you seem to be a pair against me,' her uncle grumbled.  'Anyhow I
+think it's important.  People have been talking for some time, and I
+don't want to be taken unawares; I won't be a yoked ox, mind you.'
+
+'Have you been sketching lately?' Dacier asked Miss Asper.
+
+She generally filled a book in the autumn, she said.
+
+'May I see it?'
+
+'If you wish.'
+
+They had a short tussle with her uncle and escaped.  He was conducted to
+a room midway upstairs: an heiress's conception of a saintly little room;
+and more impresive in purity, indeed it was, than a saint's, with the
+many crucifixes, gold and silver emblems, velvet prie-Dieu chairs, jewel-
+clasped sacred volumes: every invitation to meditate in luxury on an
+ascetic religiousness.
+
+She depreciated her sketching powers.  'I am impatient with my
+imperfections.  I am therefore doomed not to advance.'
+
+'On the contrary, that is the state guaranteeing ultimate excellence,'
+he said, much disposed to drone about it.
+
+She sighed: 'I fear not.'
+
+He turned the leaves, comparing her modesty with the performance.  The
+third of the leaves was a subject instantly recognized by him.  It
+represented the place he had inherited from Lord Dannisburgh.
+
+He named it.
+
+She smiled: 'You are good enough to see a likeness?  My aunt and I were
+passing it last October, and I waited for a day, to sketch.'
+
+'You have taken it from my favourite point of view.'
+
+'I am glad.'
+
+'How much I should like a copy!'
+
+'If you will accept that?'
+
+'I could not rob you.'
+
+'I can make a duplicate.'
+
+'The look of the place pleases you?'
+
+'Oh! yes; the pines behind it; the sweet little village church; even
+the appearance of the rustics;--it is all impressively old English.
+I suppose you are very seldom there?'
+
+'Does it look like a home to you?'
+
+'No place more!'
+
+'I feel the loneliness.'
+
+'Where I live I feel no loneliness!'
+
+'You have heavenly messengers near you.'
+
+'They do not always come.'
+
+'Would you consent to make the place less lonely to me?'
+
+Her bosom rose.  In deference to her maidenly understanding, she gazed
+inquiringly.
+
+'If you love it!' said he.
+
+'The place?' she said, looking soft at the possessor.
+
+'Constance!'
+
+'Is it true?'
+
+'As you yourself.  Could it be other than true?  This hand is mine?'
+
+'Oh!  Percy.'
+
+Borrowing the world's poetry to describe them, the long prayed-for Summer
+enveloped the melting snows.
+
+So the recollection of Diana's watch beside his uncle's death-bed was
+wiped out.  Ay, and the hissing of her treachery silenced.  This maidenly
+hand put him at peace with the world, instead of his defying it for a
+worthless woman--who could not do better than accept the shelter of her
+husband's house, as she ought to be told, if her friends wished her to
+save her reputation.
+
+Dacier made his way downstairs to Quintin Manx, by whom he was hotly
+congratulated and informed of the extent of the young lady's fortune:
+on the strength of which it was expected that he would certainly speak a
+private word in elucidation of that newspaper article.
+
+'I know nothing of it,' said Dacier, but promised to come and dine.
+Alone in her happiness Constance Asper despatched various brief notes
+under her gold-symbolled crest to sisterly friends; one to Lady Wathin,
+containing the, single line:
+
+'Your prophesy is confirmed.'
+
+Dacier was comfortably able to face his Club after the excitement of a
+proposal, with a bride on his hands.  He was assaulted concerning the
+article, and he parried capitally.  Say that her lips were rather cold:
+at any rate, they invigorated him.  Her character was guaranteed--not the
+hazy idea of a dupe.  And her fortune would be enormous: a speculation
+merely due to worldly prudence and prospective ambition.
+
+At the dinner-table of four, in the evening, conversation would have
+seemed dull to him, by contrast, had it not, been for the presiding grace
+of his bride, whose habitually eminent feminine air of superiority to the
+repast was throned by her appreciative receptiveness of his looks and
+utterances.  Before leaving her, he won her consent to a very early
+marriage; on the plea of a possibly approaching Session, and also that
+they had waited long.  The consent, notwithstanding the hurry of
+preparations, it involved, besides the annihilation of her desire to
+meditate on so solemn a change in her life and savour the congratulations
+of her friends and have the choir of St. Catherine's rigorously drilled
+in her favourite anthems was beautifully yielded to the pressure of
+circumstances.
+
+There lay on his table at night a letter; a bulky letter.  No need to
+tear it open for sight of the signature: the superscription was redolent
+of that betraying woman.  He tossed it unopened into the fire.
+
+As it was thick, it burned sullenly, discolouring his name on the
+address, as she had done, and still offering him a last chance of viewing
+the contents.  She fought on the consuming fire to have her exculpation
+heard.
+
+But was she not a shameless traitor?  She had caught him by his love of
+his country and hope to serve it.  She had wound into his heart to bleed
+him of all he knew and sell the secrets for money.  A wonderful sort of
+eloquence lay there, on those coals, no doubt.  He felt a slight movement
+of curiosity to glance at two or three random sentences: very slight.
+And why read them now?  They were valueless to him, mere outcries.  He
+judged her by the brute facts.  She and her slowly-consuming letter were
+of a common blackness.  Moreover, to read them when he was plighted to
+another woman would be senseless.  In the discovery of her baseness, she
+had made a poor figure.  Doubtless during the afternoon she had trimmed
+her intuitive Belial art of making 'the worse appear the better cause':
+queer to peruse, and instructive in an unprofitable department of
+knowledge-the tricks of the sex.
+
+He said to himself, with little intuition of the popular taste: She
+wouldn't be a bad heroine of Romance!  He said it derisively of the
+Romantic.  But the right worshipful heroine of Romance was the front-face
+female picture he had won for his walls.  Poor Diana was the flecked
+heroine of Reality: not always the same; not impeccable; not an ignorant-
+innocent, nor a guileless: good under good leading; devoted to the death
+in a grave crisis; often wrestling with her terrestrial nature nobly; and
+a growing soul; but not one whose purity was carved in marble for the
+assurance to an Englishman that his possession of the changeless thing
+defies time and his fellows, is the pillar of his home and universally
+enviable.  Your fair one of Romance cannot suffer a mishap without a
+plotting villain, perchance many of them; to wreak the dread iniquity:
+she cannot move without him; she is the marble block, and if she is to
+have a feature, he is the sculptor; she depends on him for life, and her
+human history at least is married to him far more than to the rescuing
+lover.  No wonder, then, that men should find her thrice cherishable
+featureless, or with the most moderate possible indication of a
+countenance.  Thousands of the excellent simple creatures do; and every
+reader of her tale.  On the contrary, the heroine of Reality is that
+woman whom you have met or heard of once in your course of years, and
+very probably despised for bearing in her composition the motive
+principle; at best, you say, a singular mixture of good and bad; anything
+but the feminine ideal of man.  Feature to some excess, you think,
+distinguishes her.  Yet she furnishes not any of the sweet sensual
+excitement pertaining to her spotless rival pursued by villany.  She
+knocks at the doors of the mind, and the mind must open to be interested
+in her.  Mind and heart must be wide open to excuse her sheer descent
+from the pure ideal of man.
+
+Dacier's wandering reflections all came back in crowds to the judicial
+Bench of the Black Cap.  He felt finely, apart from the treason, that her
+want of money degraded her: him too, by contact.  Money she might have
+had to any extent: upon application for it, of course.  How was he to
+imagine that she wanted money!  Smilingly as she welcomed him and his
+friends, entertaining them royally, he was bound to think she had means.
+A decent propriety bound him not to think of the matter at all.  He
+naturally supposed she was capable of conducting her affairs.  And--
+money!  It soiled his memory: though the hour at Rovio was rather pretty,
+and the scene at Copsley touching: other times also, short glimpses of
+the woman, were taking.  The flood of her treachery effaced them.  And
+why reflect?  Constance called to him to look her way.
+
+Diana's letter died hard.  The corners were burnt to black tissue, with
+an edge or two of discoloured paper.  A small frayed central heap still
+resisted, and in kindness to the necessity for privacy, he impressed the
+fire-tongs to complete the execution.  After which he went to his desk
+and worked, under the presidency of Constance.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+A high wind will make a dead leaf fly like a bird
+Beware the silent one of an assembly!
+Brittle is foredoomed
+Common sense is the secret of every successful civil agitation
+Its glee at a catastrophe; its poor stock of mercy
+Money is of course a rough test of virtue
+Salt of earth, to whom their salt must serve for nourishment
+Sentimentality puts up infant hands for absolution
+She herself did not like to be seen eating in public
+Slightest taste for comic analysis that does not tumble to farce
+The greed of gain is our volcano
+The man had to be endured, like other doses in politics
+Vagrant compassionateness of sentimentalists
+What might have been
+What the world says, is what the wind says
+Without those consolatory efforts, useless between men
+
+
+
+
+[The End]
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 4468 ***
diff --git a/LICENSE.txt b/LICENSE.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6312041
--- /dev/null
+++ b/LICENSE.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,11 @@
+This eBook, including all associated images, markup, improvements,
+metadata, and any other content or labor, has been confirmed to be
+in the PUBLIC DOMAIN IN THE UNITED STATES.
+
+Procedures for determining public domain status are described in
+the "Copyright How-To" at https://www.gutenberg.org.
+
+No investigation has been made concerning possible copyrights in
+jurisdictions other than the United States. Anyone seeking to utilize
+this eBook outside of the United States should confirm copyright
+status under the laws that apply to them.
diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..9449d61
--- /dev/null
+++ b/README.md
@@ -0,0 +1,2 @@
+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #4468 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4468)
diff --git a/old/4468.txt b/old/4468.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..e1373d0
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/4468.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,3939 @@
+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Diana of the Crossways, v4,
+by George Meredith
+#74 in our series by George Meredith
+
+Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the
+copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing
+this or any other Project Gutenberg file.
+
+We encourage you to keep this file, exactly as it is, on your own disk,
+thereby keeping an electronic path open for future readers.
+
+Please do not remove this.
+
+This header should be the first thing seen when anyone starts to
+view the etext. Do not change or edit it without written permission.
+The words are carefully chosen to provide users with the information
+they need to understand what they may and may not do with the etext.
+To encourage this, we have moved most of the information to the end,
+rather than having it all here at the beginning.
+
+
+**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**
+
+**Etexts Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**
+
+*****These Etexts Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!*****
+
+Information on contacting Project Gutenberg to get etexts, and
+further information, is included below.  We need your donations.
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a 501(c)(3)
+organization with EIN [Employee Identification Number] 64-6221541
+Find out about how to make a donation at the bottom of this file.
+
+
+
+Title: Diana of the Crossways, v4
+
+Author: George Meredith
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+Release Date: September, 2003 [Etext #4468]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on February 12, 2002]
+
+
+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Diana of the Crossways, v4, by Meredith
+*********This file should be named 4468.txt or 4468.zip*********
+
+This etext was produced by David Widger <widger@cecomet.net>
+
+Project Gutenberg Etexts are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the US
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we usually do not
+keep etexts in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+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 4.
+
+XXVII.    CONTAINS MATTER FOR SUBSEQUENT EXPLOSION
+XXVIII.   DIALOGUE ROUND THE SUBJECT OF A PORTRAIT, WITH SOME INDICATIONS
+          OF THE TASK FOR DIANA
+XXIX.     SHOWS THE APPROACHES OF THE POLITICAL AND THE DOMESTIC CRISIS
+          IN COMPANY
+XXX.      IN WHICH THERE IS A TASTE OF A LITTLE DINNER AND AN AFTERTASTE
+XXXI.     A CHAPTER CONTAINING GREAT POLITICAL NEWS AND THEREWITH AN
+          INTRUSION OF THE LOVE-GOD
+XXXII.    WHEREIN WE BEHOLD A GIDDY TURN AT THE SPECTRAL CROSSWAYS
+XXXIII.   EXHIBITS THE SPRINGING OF A MINE IN A NEWSPAPER ARTICLE
+XXXIV.    IN WHICH IT IS DARKLY SEEN HOW THE CRIMINAL'S JUDGE MAY BE
+          LOVE'S CRIMINAL
+XXXV.     REVEALS HOW THE TRUE HEROINE OF ROMANCE COMES FINALLY TO HER
+          TIME OF TRIUMPH
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII
+
+CONTAINS MATTER FOR SUBSEQUENT EXPLOSION
+
+Among the various letters inundating Sir Lukin Dunstane upon the report
+of the triumph of surgical skill achieved by Sir William Macpherson and
+Mr. Lanyan Thomson, was one from Lady Wathin, dated Adlands, an estate of
+Mr. Quintin Manx's in Warwickshire, petitioning for the shortest line of
+reassurance as to the condition of her dear cousin, and an intimation of
+the period when it might be deemed possible for a relative to call and
+offer her sincere congratulations: a letter deserving a personal reply,
+one would suppose.  She received the following, in a succinct female hand
+corresponding to its terseness; every 't' righteously crossed, every 'i'
+punctiliously dotted, as she remarked to Constance Asper, to whom the
+communication was transferred for perusal:
+
+     'DEAR LADY WATHIN,--Lady Dunstane is gaining strength.  The measure
+     of her pulse indicates favourably.  She shall be informed in good
+     time of your solicitude for her recovery.  The day cannot yet be
+     named for visits of any kind.  You will receive information as soon
+     as the house is open.
+
+     'I have undertaken the task of correspondence, and beg you to
+     believe me,
+
+                         'Very truly yours,
+                                             'D.  A.  WARWICK.'
+
+Miss Asper speculated on the handwriting of her rival.  She obtained
+permission to keep the letter, with the intention of transmitting it per
+post to an advertising interpreter of character in caligraphy.
+
+Such was the character of the fair young heiress, exhibited by her
+performances much more patently than the run of a quill would reveal it.
+
+She said, 'It is rather a pretty hand, I think.'
+
+'Mrs. Warwick is a practised writer,' said Lady Wathin.  'Writing is her
+profession, if she has any.  She goes to nurse my cousin.  Her husband
+says she is an excellent nurse.  He says what he can for her.  But you
+must be in the last extremity, or she is ice.  His appeal to her has been
+totally disregarded.  Until he drops down in the street, as his doctor
+expects him to do some day, she will continue her course; and even
+then .  .  .'  An adventuress desiring her freedom!  Lady Wathin looked.
+She was too devout a woman to say what she thought.  But she knew the
+world to be very wicked.  Of Mrs. Warwick, her opinion was formed.  She
+would not have charged the individual creature with a criminal design;
+all she did was to stuff the person her virtue abhorred with the
+wickedness of the world, and that is a common process in antipathy.
+
+She sympathized, moreover, with the beautiful devotedness of the wealthy
+heiress to her ideal of man.  It had led her to make the acquaintance of
+old Lady Dacier, at the house in town, where Constance Asper had first
+met Percy; Mrs. Grafton Winstanley's house, representing neutral
+territory or debateable land for the occasional intercourse of the upper
+class and the climbing in the professions or in commerce; Mrs. Grafton
+Winstanley being on the edge of aristocracy by birth, her husband, like
+Mr. Quintin Manx, a lord of fleets.  Old Lady Dacier's bluntness in
+speaking of her grandson would have shocked Lady Wathin as much as it
+astonished, had she been less of an ardent absorber of aristocratic
+manners.  Percy was plainly called a donkey, for hanging off and on with
+a handsome girl of such expectations as Miss Asper.  'But what you can't
+do with a horse, you can't hope to do with a donkey.'  She added that she
+had come for the purpose of seeing the heiress, of whose points of person
+she delivered a judgement critically appreciative as a horsefancier's on
+the racing turf.  'If a girl like that holds to it, she's pretty sure to
+get him at last.  It 's no use to pull his neck down to the water.'
+
+Lady Wathin delicately alluded to rumours of an entanglement, an
+admiration he had, ahem.
+
+'A married woman,' the veteran nodded.  'I thought that was off?  She
+must be a clever intriguer to keep him so long.'
+
+'She is undoubtedly clever,' said Lady Wathin, and it was mumbled in her
+hearing: 'The woman seems to have a taste for our family.'
+
+They agreed that they could see nothing to be done.  The young lady must
+wither, Mrs. Warwick have her day.  The veteran confided her experienced
+why to Lady Wathin: 'All the tales you tell of a woman of that sort are
+sharp sauce to the palates of men.'
+
+They might be, to the men of the dreadful gilded idle class!
+
+Mrs. Warwick's day appeared indefinitely prolonged, judging by Percy
+Dacier's behaviour to Miss Asper.  Lady Wathin watched them narrowly when
+she had the chance, a little ashamed of her sex, or indignant rather at
+his display of courtliness in exchange for her open betrayal of her
+preference.  It was almost to be wished that she would punish him by
+sacrificing herself to one of her many brilliant proposals of marriage.
+But such are women!--precisely because of his holding back he tightened
+the cord attaching him to her tenacious heart.  This was the truth.  For
+the rest, he was gracefully courteous; an observer could perceive the
+charm he exercised.  He talked with a ready affability, latterly with
+greater social ease; evidently not acting the indifferent conqueror, or
+so consummately acting it as to mask the air.  And yet he was ambitious,
+and he was not rich.  Notoriously was he ambitious, and with wealth to
+back him, a great entertaining house, troops of adherents, he would
+gather influence, be propelled to leadership.  The vexation of a constant
+itch to speak to him on the subject, and the recognition, that he knew it
+all as well as she, tormented Lady Wathin.  He gave her comforting news
+of her dear cousin in the Winter.
+
+'You have heard from Mrs. Warwick?' she said.
+
+He replied, 'I had the latest from Mr. Redworth.'
+
+'Mrs. Warwick has relinquished her post?'
+
+'When she does, you may be sure that Lady Dunstane is, perfectly
+reestablished.'
+
+'She is an excellent nurse.'
+
+'The best, I believe.'
+
+'It is a good quality in sickness.'
+
+'Proof of good all through.'
+
+'Her husband might have the advantage of it.  His state is really
+pathetic.  If she has feeling, and could only be made aware, she might
+perhaps be persuaded to pass from the friendly to the wifely duty.'
+
+Mr. Dacier bent his head to listen, and he bowed.
+
+He was fast in the toils; and though we have assurance that evil cannot
+triumph in perpetuity, the aspect of it throning provokes a kind of
+despair.  How strange if ultimately the lawyers once busy about the uncle
+were to take up the case of the nephew, and this time reverse the issue,
+by proving it!  For poor Mr. Warwick was emphatic on the question of his
+honour.  It excited him dangerously.  He was long-suffering, but with the
+slightest clue terrible.  The unknotting of the entanglement might thus
+happen--and Constance Asper would welcome her hero still.
+
+Meanwhile there was actually nothing to be done: a deplorable absence of
+motive villainy; apparently an absence of the beneficent Power directing
+events to their proper termination.  Lady Wathin heard of her cousin's
+having been removed to Cowes in May, for light Solent and Channel voyages
+on board Lord Esquart's yacht.  She heard also of heavy failures and
+convulsions in the City of London, quite unconscious that the Fates, or
+agents of the Providence she invoked to precipitate the catastrophe, were
+then beginning cavernously their performance of the part of villain in
+Diana's history.
+
+Diana and Emma enjoyed happy quiet sailings under May breezes on the
+many-coloured South-western waters, heart in heart again; the physical
+weakness of the one, the moral weakness of the other, creating that
+mutual dependency which makes friendship a pulsating tie.  Diana's
+confession had come of her letter to Emma.  When the latter was able to
+examine her correspondence, Diana brought her the heap for perusal, her
+own sealed scribble, throbbing with all the fatal might-have-been, under
+her eyes.  She could have concealed and destroyed it.  She sat beside her
+friend, awaiting her turn, hearing her say at the superscription: 'Your
+writing, Tony?' and she nodded.  She was asked: 'Shall I read it?' She
+answered: 'Read.'  They were soon locked in an embrace.  Emma had no
+perception of coldness through those brief dry lines; her thought was of
+the matter.
+
+'The danger is over now?' she said.
+
+'Yes, that danger is over now.'
+
+'You have weathered it?'
+
+'I love him.'
+
+Emma dropped a heavy sigh in pity of her, remotely in compassion for
+Redworth, the loving and unbeloved.  She was too humane and wise of our
+nature to chide her Tony for having her sex's heart.  She had charity to
+bestow on women; in defence of them against men and the world, it was a
+charity armed with the weapons of battle.  The wife madly stripped before
+the world by a jealous husband, and left chained to the rock, her youth
+wasting, her blood arrested, her sensibilities chilled and assailing her
+under their multitudinous disguises, and for whom the world is merciless,
+called forth Emma's tenderest commiseration; and that wife being Tony,
+and stricken with the curse of love, in other circumstances the blessing,
+Emma bled for her.
+
+'But nothing desperate?' she said.
+
+'No; you have saved me.'
+
+'I would knock at death's doors again, and pass them, to be sure of
+that.'
+
+'Kiss me; you may be sure.  I would not put my lips to your cheek if
+there were danger of my faltering.'
+
+'But you love him.'
+
+'I do: and because I love him I will not let him be fettered to me.'
+
+'You will see him.'
+
+'Do not imagine that his persuasions undermined your Tony.  I am subject
+to panics.'
+
+'Was it your husband?'
+
+'I had a visit from Lady Wathin.  She knows him.  She came as peacemaker.
+She managed to hint at his authority.  Then came a letter from him--of
+supplication, interpenetrated with the hint: a suffused atmosphere.  Upon
+that; unexpected by me, my--let me call him so once, forgive me!--lover
+came.  Oh! he loves me, or did then.  Percy!  He had been told that I
+should be claimed.  I felt myself the creature I am--a wreck of marriage.
+But I fancied I could serve him:--I saw golden.  My vanity was the chief
+traitor.  Cowardice of course played a part.  In few things that we do,
+where self is concerned, will cowardice not be found.  And the
+hallucination colours it to seem a lovely heroism.  That was the second
+time Mr. Redworth arrived.  I am always at crossways, and he rescues me;
+on this occasion unknowingly.'
+
+'There's a divinity .  .  .'  said Emma.  ' When I think of it I perceive
+that Patience is our beneficent fairy godmother, who brings us our
+harvest in the long result.'
+
+'My dear, does she bring us our labourers' rations, to sustain us for the
+day?' said Diana.'
+
+'Poor fare, but enough.'
+
+'I fear I was born godmotherless.'
+
+'You have stores of patience, Tony; only now and then fits of
+desperation.'
+
+'My nature's frailty, the gap in it: we will give it no fine names
+--they cover our pitfalls.  I am open to be carried on a tide of
+unreasonableness when the coward cries out.  But I can say, dear, that
+after one rescue, a similar temptation is unlikely to master me.  I do
+not subscribe to the world's decrees for love of the monster, though I am
+beginning to understand the dues of allegiance.  We have ceased to write
+letters.  You may have faith in me.'
+
+'I have, with my whole soul,' said Emma.
+
+So the confession closed; and in the present instance there were not any
+forgotten chambers to be unlocked and ransacked for addenda confessions.
+
+The subjects discoursed of by the two endeared the hours to them.  They
+were aware that the English of the period would have laughed a couple of
+women to scorn for venturing on them, and they were not a little hostile
+in consequence, and shot their epigrams profusely, applauding the keener
+that appeared to score the giant bulk of their intolerant enemy, who
+holds the day, but not the morrow.  Us too he holds for the day, to
+punish us if we have temporal cravings.  He scatters his gifts to the
+abject; tossing to us rebels bare dog-biscuit.  But the life of the
+spirit is beyond his region; we have our morrow in his day when we crave
+nought of him.  Diana and Emma delighted to discover that they were each
+the rebel of their earlier and less experienced years; each a member of
+the malcontent minor faction, the salt of earth, to whom their salt must
+serve for nourishment, as they admitted, relishing it determinedly, not
+without gratification.
+
+Sir Lukin was busy upon his estate in Scotland.  They summoned young
+Arthur Rhodes to the island, that he might have a taste of the new
+scenes.  Diana was always wishing for his instruction and refreshment;
+and Redworth came to spend a Saturday and Sunday with them, and showed
+his disgust of the idle boy, as usual, at the same time consulting them
+on the topic of furniture for the Berkshire mansion he had recently
+bought, rather vaunting the Spanish pictures his commissioner in Madrid
+was transmitting.  The pair of rebels, vexed by his treatment of the
+respectful junior, took him for an incarnation of their enemy, and pecked
+and worried the man astonishingly.  He submitted to it like the placable
+giant.  Yes, he was a Liberal, and furnishing and decorating the house in
+the stability of which he trusted.  Why not?  We must accept the world as
+it is, try to improve it by degrees.--Not so: humanity will not wait for
+you, the victims are shrieking beneath the bricks of your enormous
+edifice, behind the canvas of your pictures.  'But you may really say
+that luxurious yachting is an odd kind of insurgency,' avowed Diana.
+'It's the tangle we are in.'
+
+'It's the coat we have to wear; and why fret at it for being
+comfortable?'
+
+'I don't half enough, when I think of my shivering neighbours.'
+
+'Money is of course a rough test of virtue,' said Redworth.  'We have no
+other general test.'
+
+Money!  The ladies proclaimed it a mere material test; Diana, gazing on
+sunny sea, with an especial disdain.  And name us your sort of virtue.
+There is more virtue in poverty, He denied that.  Inflexibly British, he
+declared money, and also the art of getting money, to be hereditary
+virtues, deserving of their reward.  The reward a superior wealth and its
+fruits?  Yes, the power to enjoy and spread enjoyment: and let idleness
+envy both!  He abused idleness, and by implication the dilettante
+insurgency fostering it.  However, he was compensatingly heterodox in his
+view of the Law's persecution of women; their pertinacious harpings on
+the theme had brought him to that; and in consideration of the fact, as
+they looked from yacht to shore, of their being rebels participating
+largely in the pleasures of the tyrant's court, they allowed him to
+silence them, and forgave him.
+
+Thoughts upon money and idleness were in confusion with Diana.  She had a
+household to support in London, and she was not working; she could not
+touch THE CANTATRICE while Emma was near.  Possibly, she again
+ejaculated, the Redworths of the world were right: the fruitful labours
+were with the mattock and hoe, or the mind directing them.  It was a
+crushing invasion of materialism, so she proposed a sail to the coast of
+France, and thither they flew, touching Cherbourg, Alderney, Sark,
+Guernsey, and sighting the low Brittany rocks.  Memorable days to Arthur
+Rhodes.  He saw perpetually the one golden centre in new scenes.  He
+heard her voice, he treasured her sayings; her gestures, her play of lip
+and eyelid, her lift of head, lightest movements, were imprinted on him,
+surely as the heavens are mirrored in the quiet seas, firmly and richly
+as earth answers to the sprinkled grain.  For he was blissfully athirst,
+untroubled by a hope.  She gave him more than she knew of: a present that
+kept its beating heart into the future; a height of sky, a belief in
+nobility, permanent through manhood down to age.  She was his foam-born
+Goddess of those leaping waters; differently hued, crescented,
+a different influence.  He had a happy week, and it charmed Diana to hear
+him tell her so.  In spite of Redworth, she had faith in the fruit-
+bearing powers of a time of simple happiness, and shared the youth's in
+reflecting it.  Only the happiness must be simple, that of the glass to
+the lovely face: no straining of arms to retain, no heaving of the bosom
+in vacancy.
+
+His poverty and capacity for pure enjoyment led her to think of him
+almost clingingly when hard news reached her from the quaint old City of
+London, which despises poverty and authorcraft and all mean adventurers,
+and bows to the lordly merchant, the mighty financier, Redworth's
+incarnation of the virtues.  Happy days on board the yacht Clarissa!
+Diana had to recall them with effort.  They who sow their money for a
+promising high percentage have built their habitations on the sides of
+the most eruptive mountain in Europe.  AEtna supplies more certain
+harvests, wrecks fewer vineyards and peaceful dwellings.  The greed of
+gain is our volcano.  Her wonder leapt up at the slight inducement she
+had received to embark her money in this Company: a South-American mine,
+collapsed almost within hearing of the trumpets of prospectus, after two
+punctual payments of the half-yearly interest.  A Mrs. Ferdinand Cherson,
+an elder sister of the pretty Mrs. Fryar-Gunnett, had talked to her of
+the cost of things one afternoon at Lady Singleby's garden-party, and
+spoken of the City as the place to help to swell an income, if only you
+have an acquaintance with some of the chief City men.  The great mine was
+named, and the rush for allotments.  She knew a couple of the Directors.
+They vowed to her that ten per cent. was a trifle; the fortune to be
+expected out of the mine was already clearly estimable at forties and
+fifties.  For their part they anticipated cent. per cent.  Mrs. Cherson
+said she wanted money, and had therefore invested in the mine.  It seemed
+so consequent, the cost of things being enormous!  She and her sister
+Mrs. Fryar-Gunnett owned husbands who did their bidding, because of their
+having the brains, it might be understood.  Thus five thousand pounds
+invested would speedily bring five thousand pounds per annum.  Diana had
+often dreamed of the City of London as the seat of magic; and taking the
+City's contempt for authorcraft and the intangible as, from its point of
+view, justly founded, she had mixed her dream strangely with an ancient
+notion of the City's probity.  Her broker's shaking head did not damp her
+ardour for shares to the full amount of her ability to purchase.  She
+remembered her satisfaction at the allotment; the golden castle shot up
+from this fountain mine.  She had a frenzy for mines and fished in some
+English with smaller sums.  'I am now a miner,' she had exclaimed,
+between dismay at her audacity and the pride of it.  Why had she not
+consulted Redworth?  He would peremptorily have stopped the frenzy in its
+first intoxicating effervescence.  She, like Mrs. Cherson, like all women
+who have plunged upon the cost of things, wanted money.  She naturally
+went to the mine.  Address him for counsel in the person of dupe, she
+could not; shame was a barrier.  Could she tell him that the prattle of
+a woman, spendthrift as Mrs. Cherson, had induced her to risk her money?
+Latterly the reports of Mrs. Fryar-Gunnett were not of the flavour to
+make association of their names agreeable to his hearing.
+
+She had to sit down in the buzz of her self-reproaches and amazement at
+the behaviour of that reputable City, shrug, and recommence the labour of
+her pen.  Material misfortune had this one advantage; it kept her from
+speculative thoughts of her lover, and the meaning of his absence and,
+silence.
+
+Diana's perusal of the incomplete CANTATRICE was done with the cold
+critical eye interpreting for the public.  She was forced to write on
+nevertheless, and exactly in the ruts of the foregoing matter.  It
+propelled her.  No longer perversely, of necessity she wrote her best,
+convinced that the work was doomed to unpopularity, resolved that it
+should be at least a victory in style.  A fit of angry cynicism now and
+then set her composing phrases as baits for the critics to quote,
+condemnatory of the attractiveness of the work.  Her mood was bad.  In
+addition, she found Whitmonby cool; he complained of the coolness of her
+letter of adieu; complained of her leaving London so long.  How could she
+expect to be his Queen of the London Salon if she lost touch of the
+topics?  He made no other allusion.  They were soon on amicable terms, at
+the expense of flattering arts that she had not hitherto practised.  But
+Westlake revealed unimagined marvels of the odd corners of the masculine
+bosom.  He was the man of her circle the neatest in epigram, the widest
+of survey, an Oriental traveller, a distinguished writer, and if not
+personally bewitching, remarkably a gentleman of the world.  He was
+wounded; he said as much.  It came to this: admitting that he had no
+claims, he declared it to be unbearable for him to see another preferred.
+The happier was unmentioned, and Diana scraped his wound by rallying him.
+He repeated that he asked only to stand on equal terms with the others;
+her preference of one was past his tolerance.  She told him that since
+leaving Lady Dunstane she had seen but Whitmonby, Wilmers, and him.  He
+smiled sarcastically, saying he had never had a letter from her, except
+the formal one of invitation.
+
+'Powers of blarney, have you forsaken a daughter of Erin?' cried Diana.
+'Here is a friend who has a craving for you, and I talk sense to him.  I
+have written to none of my set since I last left London.'
+
+She pacified him by doses of cajolery new to her tongue.  She liked him,
+abhorred the thought of losing any of her friends, so the cajoling
+sentences ran until Westlake betrayed an inflammable composition,
+and had to be put out, and smoked sullenly.  Her resources were tried
+in restoring him to reason.  The months of absence from London appeared
+to have transformed her world.  Tonans was moderate.  The great editor
+rebuked her for her prolonged absence from London, not so much because it
+discrowned her as Queen of the Salon, but candidly for its rendering her
+service less to him.  Everything she knew of men and affairs was to him
+stale.
+
+'How do you get to the secrets?' she asked.
+
+'By sticking to the centre of them,' he said.
+
+'But how do you manage to be in advance and act the prophet?'
+
+'Because I will have them at any price, and that is known.'
+
+She hinted at the peccant City Company.
+
+'I think I have checked the mining mania, as I did the railway,' said he;
+'and so far it was a public service.  There's no checking of maniacs.'
+
+She took her whipping within and without.  'On another occasion I shall
+apply to you, Mr. Tonans.'
+
+'Ah, there was a time when you could have been a treasure to me,' he
+rejoined; alluding of course to the Dannisburgh days.
+
+In dejection, as she mused on those days, and on her foolish ambition
+to have a London house where her light might burn, she advised herself,
+with Redworth's voice, to quit the house, arrest expenditure, and try
+for happiness by burning and shining in the spirit: devoting herself,
+as Arthur Rhodes did, purely to literature.  It became almost a decision.
+
+Percy she had still neither written to nor heard from, and she dared not
+hope to meet him.  She fancied a wish to have tidings of his marriage: it
+would be peace; if in desolation.  Now that she had confessed and given
+her pledge to Emma, she had so far broken with him as to render the
+holding him chained a cruelty, and his reserve whispered of a rational
+acceptance of the end between them.  She thanked him for it; an act
+whereby she was: instantly melted to such softness that a dread of him
+haunted her.  Coward, take up your burden for armour! she called to her
+poor dungeoned self wailing to have common nourishment.  She knew how
+prodigiously it waxed on crumbs; nay, on the imagination of small
+morsels.  By way of chastizing it, she reviewed her life, her behaviour
+to her husband, until she sank backward to a depth deprived of air and
+light.  That life with her husband was a dungeon to her nature deeper
+than any imposed by present conditions.  She was then a revolutionary to
+reach to the breath of day.  She had now to be, only not a coward, and
+she could breathe as others did.  'Women who sap the moral laws pull down
+the pillars of the temple on their sex,' Emma had said.  Diana perceived
+something of her personal debt to civilization.  Her struggles passed
+into the doomed CANTATRICE occupying days and nights under pressure for
+immediate payment; the silencing of friend Debit, ridiculously calling
+himself Credit, in contempt of sex and conduct, on the ground, that he
+was he solely by virtue of being she.  He had got a trick of singing
+operatic solos in the form and style of the delightful tenor Tellio, and
+they were touching in absurdity, most real in unreality.  Exquisitely
+trilled, after Tellio's manner,
+
+                   'The tradesmen all beseech ye,
+                    The landlord, cook and maid,
+                    Complete THE CANTATRICE,
+                    That they may soon be paid.'
+
+provoked her to laughter in pathos.  He approached, posturing himself
+operatically, with perpetual new verses, rhymes to Danvers, rhymes to
+Madame Sybille, the cook.  Seeing Tellio at one of Henry Wilmers' private
+concerts, Diana's lips twitched to dimples at the likeness her familiar
+had assumed.  She had to compose her countenance to talk to him;
+but the moment of song was the trial.  Lady Singleby sat beside her,
+and remarked:
+
+'You have always fun going on in you!' She partook of the general
+impression that Diana Warwick was too humorous to nurse a downright
+passion.
+
+Before leaving, she engaged Diana to her annual garden-party of the
+closing season, and there the meeting with Percy occurred, not
+unobserved.  Had they been overheard, very little to implicate them
+would have been gathered.  He walked in full view across the lawn
+to her, and they presented mask to mask.
+
+'The beauty of the day tempts you at last, Mrs. Warwick.'
+
+'I have been finishing a piece of work.'
+
+Lovely weather, beautiful dresses: agreed.  Diana wore a yellow robe
+with a black bonnet, and he commented on the becoming hues; for the first
+time, he noticed her dress!  Lovely women?  Dacier hesitated.  One he
+saw.  But surely he must admire Mrs. Fryar-Gunnett?  And who steps beside
+her, transparently fascinated, with visage at three-quarters to the rays
+within her bonnet?  Can it be Sir Lukin Dunstane? and beholding none but
+his charmer!
+
+Dacier withdrew his eyes thoughtfully from the spectacle, and moved to
+woo Diana to a stroll.  She could not restrain her feet; she was out of
+the ring of her courtiers for the moment.  He had seized his opportunity.
+
+'It is nearly a year!' he said.
+
+'I have been nursing nearly all the time, doing the work I do best.'
+
+'Unaltered?'
+
+'A year must leave its marks.'
+
+'Tony!'
+
+'You speak of a madwoman, a good eleven months dead.  Let her rest.
+Those are the conditions.'
+
+'Accepted, if I may see her.'
+
+'Honestly accepted?'
+
+'Imposed fatally, I have to own.  I have felt with you: you are the
+wiser.  But, admitting that, surely we can meet.  I may see you?'
+
+'My house has not been shut.'
+
+'I respected the house.  I distrusted myself.'
+
+'What restores your confidence?'
+
+'The strength I draw from you.'
+
+One of the Beauties at a garden-party is lucky to get as many minutes as
+had passed in quietness.  Diana was met and captured.  But those last
+words of Percy's renewed her pride in him by suddenly building a firm
+faith in herself.  Noblest of lovers!  she thought, and brooded on the
+little that had been spoken, the much conveyed, for a proof of perfect
+truthfulness.
+
+The world had watched them.  It pronounced them discreet if culpable;
+probably cold to the passion both.  Of Dacier's coldness it had no doubt,
+and Diana's was presumed from her comical flights of speech.  She was
+given to him because of the known failure of her other adorers.  He in
+the front rank of politicians attracted her with the lustre of his
+ambition; she him with her mingling of talent and beauty.  An astute
+world; right in the main, owing to perceptions based upon brute nature;
+utterly astray in particulars, for the reason that it takes no count of
+the soul of man or woman.  Hence its glee at a catastrophe; its poor
+stock of mercy.  And when no catastrophe follows, the prophet, for the
+honour of the profession, must decry her as cunning beyond aught yet
+revealed of a serpent sex.
+
+Save for a word or two, the watchman might have overheard and trumpeted
+his report of their interview at Diana's house.  After the first pained
+breathing, when they found themselves alone in that room where they had
+plighted their fortunes, they talked allusively to define the terms
+imposed on them by Reason.  The thwarted step was unmentioned; it was a
+past madness.  But Wisdom being recognized, they could meet.  It would be
+hard if that were denied!  They talked very little of their position;
+both understood the mutual acceptance of it; and now that he had seen her
+and was again under the spell, Dacier's rational mind, together with his
+delight in her presence, compelled him honourably to bow to the terms.
+Only, as these were severe upon lovers, the innocence of their meetings
+demanded indemnification in frequency.
+
+'Come whenever you think I can be useful,' said Diana.
+
+They pressed hands at parting, firmly and briefly, not for the ordinary
+dactylology of lovers, but in sign of the treaty of amity.
+
+She soon learnt that she had tied herself to her costly household.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVIII
+
+DIALOGUE ROUND THE SUBJECT OF A PORTRAIT, WITH SOME INDICATIONS OF THE
+TASK FOR DIANA
+
+An enamoured Egeria who is not a princess in her worldly state nor a
+goddess by origin has to play one of those parts which strain the woman's
+faculties past naturalness. She must never expose her feelings to her
+lover; she must make her counsel weighty--otherwise she is little his
+nymph of the pure wells, and what she soon may be, the world will say.
+She has also, most imperatively, to dazzle him without the betrayal of
+artifice, where simple spontaneousness is beyond conjuring.  But feelings
+that are constrained becloud the judgement besides arresting the fine jet
+of delivery wherewith the mastered lover is taught through his ears to
+think himself prompted, and submit to be controlled, by a creature super-
+feminine.  She must make her counsel so weighty in poignant praises as to
+repress impulses that would rouse her own; and her betraying
+impulsiveness was a subject of reflection to Diana after she had given
+Percy Dacier, metaphorically, the key of her house.  Only as true Egeria
+could she receive him.  She was therefore grateful, she thanked and
+venerated this noblest of lovers for his not pressing to the word of
+love, and so strengthening her to point his mind, freshen his moral
+energies and inspirit him.  His chivalrous acceptance of the conditions
+of their renewed intimacy was a radiant knightliness to Diana, elevating
+her with a living image for worship:--he so near once to being the
+absolute lord of her destinies!  How to reward him, was her sole
+dangerous thought.  She prayed and strove that she might give him of her
+best, to practically help him; and she had reason to suppose she could do
+it, from the visible effect of her phrases.  He glistened in repeating
+them; he had fallen into the habit; before witnesses too; in the presence
+of Miss Paynham, who had taken earnestly to the art of painting, and
+obtained her dear Mrs. Warwick's promise of a few sittings for the sketch
+of a portrait, near the close of the season.  'A very daring thing to
+attempt,' Miss Paynham said, when he was comparing her first outlines and
+the beautiful breathing features.  'Even if one gets the face, the lips
+will seem speechless, to those who know her.'
+
+'If they have no recollection,' said Dacier.
+
+'I mean, the endeavour should be to represent them at the moment of
+speaking.'
+
+'Put it into the eyes.'  He looked at the eyes.
+
+She looked at the mouth.  'But it is the mouth, more than the eyes.'
+
+He looked at the face.  'Where there is character, you have only to study
+it to be sure of a likeness.'
+
+'That is the task, with one who utters jewels, Mr. Dacier.'
+
+'Bright wit, I fear, is above the powers of your art.'
+
+'Still I feel it could be done.  See--now--that!'
+
+Diana's lips had opened to say: 'Confess me a model model: I am dissected
+while I sit for portrayal.  I must be for a moment like the frog of the
+two countrymen who were disputing as to the manner of his death, when he
+stretched to yawn, upon which they agreed that he had defeated the truth
+for both of them.  I am not quite inanimate.'
+
+'Irish countrymen,' said Dacier.
+
+'The story adds, that blows were arrested; so confer the nationality as
+you please.'
+
+Diana had often to divert him from a too intent perusal of her features
+with sparkles and stories current or invented to serve the immediate
+purpose.
+
+Miss Paynham was Mrs. Warwick's guest for a fortnight, and observed them
+together.  She sometimes charitably laid down her pencil and left them,
+having forgotten this or that.  They were conversing of general matters
+with their usual crisp precision on her return, and she was rather like
+the two countrymen, in debating whether it was excess of coolness or
+discreetness; though she was convinced of their inclinations, and
+expected love some day to be leaping up.  Diana noticed that she had no
+reminder for leaving the room when it was Mr. Redworth present.  These
+two had become very friendly, according to her hopes; and Miss Paynham
+was extremely solicitous to draw suggestions from Mr. Redworth and win
+his approval.
+
+'Do I appear likely to catch the mouth now, do you think, Mr. Redworth?'
+
+He remarked, smiling at Diana's expressive dimple, that the mouth was
+difficult to catch.  He did not gaze intently.  Mr. Redworth was the
+genius of friendship, 'the friend of women,' Mrs. Warwick had said of
+him.  Miss Paynham discovered it, as regarded herself.  The portrait was
+his commission to her, kindly proposed, secretly of course, to give her
+occupation and the chance of winning a vogue with the face of a famous
+Beauty.  So many, however, were Mrs. Warwick's visitors, and so lively
+the chatter she directed, that accurate sketching was difficult to an
+amateurish hand.  Whitmonby, Sullivan Smith, Westlake, Henry Wilmers,
+Arthur Rhodes, and other gentlemen, literary and military, were almost
+daily visitors when it became known that the tedium of the beautiful
+sitter required beguiling and there was a certainty of finding her at
+home.  On Mrs. Warwick's Wednesday numerous ladies decorated the group.
+Then was heard such a rillet of dialogue without scandal or politics,
+as nowhere else in Britain; all vowed it subsequently; for to the
+remembrance it seemed magical.  Not a breath of scandal, and yet the
+liveliest flow.  Lady Pennon came attended by a Mr. Alexander Hepburn,
+a handsome Scot, at whom Dacier shot one of his instinctive keen glances,
+before seeing that the hostess had mounted a transient colour.  Mr.
+Hepburn, in settling himself on his chair rather too briskly, contrived
+the next minute to break a precious bit of China standing by his elbow;
+and Lady Pennon cried out, with sympathetic anguish: 'Oh, my dear, what a
+trial for you!'
+
+'Brittle is foredoomed,' said Diana, unruffled.
+
+She deserved compliments, and would have had them if she had not wounded
+the most jealous and petulant of her courtiers.
+
+'Then the Turk is a sapient custodian!' said Westlake, vexed with her
+flush at the entrance of the Scot.
+
+Diana sedately took his challenge.  'We, Mr. Westlake, have the
+philosophy of ownership.'
+
+Mr. Hepburn penitentially knelt to pick up the fragments, and Westlake
+murmured over his head: 'As long as it is we who are the cracked.'
+
+'Did we not start from China?'
+
+'We were consequently precipitated to Stamboul.'
+
+'You try to elude the lesson.'
+
+'I remember my first paedagogue telling me so when he rapped the book on
+my cranium.'
+
+'The mark of the book is not a disfigurement.'
+
+It was gently worded, and the shrewder for it.  The mark of the book,
+if not a disfigurement, was a characteristic of Westlake's fashion of
+speech.  Whitmonby nodded twice, for signification of a palpable hit in
+that bout; and he noted within him the foolishness of obtruding the
+remotest allusion to our personality when crossing the foils with a
+woman.  She is down on it like the lightning, quick as she is in her
+contracted circle, politeness guarding her from a riposte.
+
+Mr. Hepburn apologized very humbly, after regaining his chair.  Diana
+smiled and said: 'Incidents in a drawing-room are prize-shots at
+Dulness.'
+
+'And in a dining-room too,' added Sullivan Smith.  'I was one day at a
+dinner-party, apparently of undertakers hired to mourn over the joints
+and the birds in the dishes, when the ceiling came down, and we all
+sprang up merry as crickets.  It led to a pretty encounter and a real
+prize-shot.'
+
+'Does that signify a duel?' asked Lady Pennon.
+
+''Twould be the vulgar title, to bring it into discredit with the
+populace, my lady.'
+
+'Rank me one of the populace then!  I hate duelling and rejoice that it
+is discountenanced.'
+
+'The citizens, and not the populace, I think Mr. Sullivan Smith means,'
+Diana said.  'The citizen is generally right in morals.  My father also
+was against the practice, when it raged at its "prettiest."  I have heard
+him relate a story of a poor friend of his, who had to march out for a
+trifle, and said, as he accepted the invitation, "It's all nonsense!"
+and walking to the measured length, "It's all nonsense, you know!"  and
+when lying on the ground, at his last gasp, "I told you it was all
+nonsense!"'
+
+Sullivan Smith leaned over to Whitmonby and Dacier amid the ejaculations,
+and whispered: 'A lady's way of telling the story!--and excuseable to
+her:--she had to Jonah the adjective.  What the poor fellow said was--'
+He murmured the sixty-pounder adjective, as in the belly of the whale, to
+rightly emphasize his noun.
+
+Whitmonby nodded to the superior relish imparted by the vigour of
+masculine veracity in narration.  'A story for its native sauce
+piquante,' he said.
+
+'Nothing without it!'
+
+They had each a dissolving grain of contempt for women compelled by
+their delicacy to spoil that kind of story which demands the piquant
+accompaniment to flavour it racily and make it passable.  For to see
+insipid mildness complacently swallowed as an excellent thing, knowing
+the rich smack of savour proper to the story, is your anecdotal
+gentleman's annoyance.  But if the anecdote had supported him, Sullivan
+Smith would have let the expletive rest.
+
+Major Carew Mahoney capped Mrs. Warwick's tale of the unfortunate
+duellist with another, that confessed the practice absurd, though he
+approved of it; and he cited Lord Larrian's opinion: 'It keeps men braced
+to civil conduct.'
+
+'I would not differ with the dear old lord; but no! the pistol is the
+sceptre of the bully,' said Diana.
+
+Mr. Hepburn, with the widest of eyes on her in perpetuity, warmly agreed;
+and the man was notorious among men for his contrary action.
+
+'Most righteously our Princess Egeria distinguishes her reign by
+prohibiting it,' said Lady Singleby.
+
+'And how,' Sullivan Smith sighed heavily, 'how, I'd ask, are ladies to be
+protected from the bully?'
+
+He was beset: 'So it was all for us? all in consideration for our
+benefit?'
+
+He mournfully exclaimed: 'Why, surely!'
+
+'That is the funeral apology of the Rod, at the close of every barbarous
+chapter,' said Diana.
+
+'Too fine in mind, too fat in body; that is a consequence with men, dear
+madam.  The conqueror stands to his weapons, or he loses his
+possessions.'
+
+'Mr. Sullivan Smith jumps at his pleasure from the special to the
+general, and will be back, if we follow him, Lady Pennon.  It is the
+trick men charge to women, showing that they can resemble us.'
+
+Lady Pennon thumped her knee.  'Not a bit.  There's no resemblance, and
+they know nothing of us.'
+
+'Women are a blank to them, I believe,' said Whitmonby, treacherously
+bowing;--and Westlake said:
+
+'Traces of a singular scrawl have been observed when they were held in
+close proximity to the fire.'
+
+'Once, on the top of a coach,' Whitmonby resumed, 'I heard a comely dame
+of the period when summers are ceasing threatened by her husband with a
+divorce, for omitting to put sandwiches in their luncheon-basket.  She
+made him the inscrutable answer: "Ah, poor man! you will go down ignorant
+to your grave!"  We laughed, and to this day I cannot tell you why.'
+
+'That laugh was from a basket lacking provision; and I think we could
+trace our separation to it,' Diana said to Lady Pennon, who replied:
+'They expose themselves; they get no nearer to the riddle.'
+
+Miss Courtney, a rising young actress, encouraged by a smile from Mrs.
+Warwick, remarked: 'On the stage, we have each our parts equally.'
+
+'And speaking parts; not personae mutae.'
+
+'The stage has advanced in verisimilitude,' Henry Wilmers added slyly;
+and Diana rejoined: 'You recognize a verisimilitude of the mirror when
+it is in advance of reality.  Flatter the sketch, Miss Paynham, for a
+likeness to be seen.  Probably there are still Old Conservatives who
+would prefer the personation of us by boys.'
+
+'I don't know,' Westlake affected dubiousness.  'I have heard that a step
+to the riddle is gained by a serious contemplation of boys.'
+
+'Serious?'
+
+'That is the doubt.'
+
+'The doubt throws its light on the step!'
+
+'I advise them not to take any leap from their step,' said Lady Pennon.
+
+'It would be a way of learning that we are no wiser than our sires; but
+perhaps too painful a way,' Whitmonby observed.  'Poor Mountford Wilts
+boasted of knowing women; and--he married.  To jump into the mouth of the
+enigma, is not to read it.'
+
+'You are figures of conceit when you speculate on us, Mr. Whitmonby.'
+
+'An occupation of our leisure, my lady, for your amusement.'
+
+'The leisure of the humming-top, a thousand to the minute, with the
+pretence that it sleeps!' Diana said.
+
+'The sacrilegious hand to strip you of your mystery is withered as it
+stretches,' exclaimed Westlake.  'The sage and the devout are in accord
+for once.'
+
+'And whichever of the two I may be, I'm one of them, happy to do my
+homage blindfold!' Sullivan Smith waved the sign of it.
+
+Diana sent her eyes over him and Mr. Hepburn, seeing Dacier.  'That rosy
+mediaevalism seems the utmost we can expect.'  An instant she saddened,
+foreboding her words to be ominous, because of suddenly thirsting for a
+modern cry from him, the silent.  She quitted her woman's fit of
+earnestness, and took to the humour that pleased him.  'Aslauga's knight,
+at his blind man's buff of devotion, catches the hem of the tapestry and
+is found by his lady kissing it in a trance of homage five hours long!
+Sir Hilary of Agincourt, returned from the wars to his castle at
+midnight, hears that the chitellaine is away dancing, and remains with
+all his men mounted in the courtyard till the grey morn brings her back!
+Adorable!  We had a flag flying in those days.  Since men began to fret
+the riddle, they have hauled it down half-mast.  Soon we shall behold a
+bare pole and hats on around it.  That is their solution.'
+
+A smile circled at the hearing of Lady Singleby say: 'Well, I am all for
+our own times, however literal the men.'
+
+'We are two different species!' thumped Lady Pennon, swimming on the
+theme.  'I am sure, I read what they write of women!  And their
+heroines!'
+
+Lady Esquart acquiesced: 'We are utter fools or horrid knaves.'
+
+'Nature's original hieroglyphs--which have that appearance to the
+peruser,' Westlake assented.
+
+'And when they would decipher us, and they hit on one of our "arts," the
+literary pirouette they perform is memorable.'  Diana looked invitingly
+at Dacier.  'But I for one discern a possible relationship and a
+likeness.'
+
+'I think it exists--behind a curtain,' Dacier replied.
+
+'Before the era of the Nursery.  Liberty to grow; independence is the key
+of the secret.'
+
+'And what comes after the independence?' he inquired.
+
+Whitmonby, musing that some distraction of an earnest incentive spoilt
+Mrs. Warwick's wit, informed him: 'The two different species then break
+their shallow armistice and join the shock of battle for possession of
+the earth, and we are outnumbered and exterminated, to a certainty.
+So I am against independence.'
+
+'Socially a Mussulman, subject to explosions!' Diana said.  'So the
+eternal duel between us is maintained, and men will protest that they are
+for civilization.  Dear me, I should like to write a sketch of the women
+of the future--don't be afraid!--the far future.  What a different earth
+you will see!'
+
+And very different creatures!  the gentlemen unanimously surmised.
+Westlake described the fairer portion, no longer the weaker; frightful
+hosts.
+
+Diana promised him a sweeter picture, if ever she brought her hand to
+paint it.
+
+'You would be offered up to the English national hangman, Jehoiachim
+Sneer,' interposed Arthur Rhodes, evidently firing a gun too big for him,
+of premeditated charging, as his patroness perceived; but she knew him to
+be smarting under recent applications of the swish of Mr. Sneer, and that
+he rushed to support her.  She covered him by saying: 'If he has to be
+encountered, he kills none but the cripple,' wherewith the dead pause
+ensuing from a dose of outlandish speech in good company was bridged,
+though the youth heard Westlake mutter unpleasantly: 'Jehoiachim,' and
+had to endure a stare of Dacier's, who did not conceal his want of
+comprehension of the place he occupied in Mrs. Warwick's gatherings.
+
+'They know nothing of us whatever!' Lady Pennon harped on her dictum.
+
+'They put us in a case and profoundly study the captive creature,' said
+Diana: 'but would any man understand this .  .  . ?' She dropped her
+voice and drew in the heads of Lady Pennon, Lady Singleby, Lady Esquart
+and Miss Courtney: 'Real woman's nature speaks.  A maid of mine had a
+"follower."  She was a good girl; I was anxious about her and asked her
+if she could trust him.  "Oh, yes, ma'am," she replied, "I can; he's quite
+like a female."  I longed to see the young man, to tell him he had
+received the highest of eulogies.'
+
+The ladies appreciatingly declared that such a tale was beyond the
+understandings of men.  Miss Paynham primmed her mouth, admitting to
+herself her inability to repeat such a tale; an act that she deemed not
+'quite like a lady.'  She had previously come to the conclusion that Mrs.
+Warwick, with all her generous qualities, was deficient in delicate
+sentiment--owing perhaps to her coldness of temperament.  Like Dacier
+also, she failed to comprehend the patronage of Mr. Rhodes: it led to
+suppositions; indefinite truly, and not calumnious at all; but a young
+poet, rather good-looking and well built, is not the same kind of wing-
+chick as a young actress, like Miss Courtney--Mrs. Warwick's latest
+shieldling: he is hardly enrolled for the reason that was assumed to
+sanction Mrs. Warwick's maid in the encouragement of her follower.
+Miss Paynham sketched on, with her thoughts in her bosom: a damsel
+castigatingly pursued by the idea of sex as the direct motive of every
+act of every person surrounding, her; deductively therefore that a
+certain form of the impelling passion, mild or terrible, or capricious,
+or it might be less pardonable, was unceasingly at work among the human
+couples up to decrepitude.  And she too frequently hit the fact to doubt
+her gift of reading into them.  Mr. Dacier was plain, and the state of
+young Mr. Rhodes; and the Scottish gentleman was at least a vehement
+admirer.  But she penetrated the breast of Mr. Thomas Redworth as well,
+mentally tore his mask of friendship to shreds.  He was kind indeed in
+commissioning her to do the portrait.  His desire for it, and his urgency
+to have the features exactly given, besides the infrequency of his visits
+of late, when a favoured gentleman was present, were the betraying signs.
+Deductively, moreover, the lady who inspired the passion in numbers of
+gentlemen and set herself to win their admiration with her lively play of
+dialogue, must be coquettish; she could hold them only by coldness.
+Anecdotes, epigrams, drolleries, do not bubble to the lips of a woman who
+is under an emotional spell: rather they prove that she has the spell for
+casting.  It suited Mr. Dacier, Miss Paynham thought: it was cruel to Mr.
+Redworth; at whom, of all her circle, the beautiful woman looked, when
+speaking to him, sometimes tenderly.
+
+'Beware the silent one of an assembly!' Diana had written.  She did not
+think of her words while Miss Paynham continued mutely sketching.  The
+silent ones, with much conversation around them, have their heads at
+work, critically perforce; the faster if their hands are occupied; and
+the point they lean to do is the pivot of their thoughts.  Miss Paynham
+felt for Mr. Redworth.
+
+Diana was unaware of any other critic present than him she sought to
+enliven, not unsuccessfully, notwithstanding his English objection to the
+pitch of the converse she led, and a suspicion of effort to support it:--
+just a doubt, with all her easy voluble run, of the possibility of
+naturalness in a continuous cleverness.  But he signified pleasure,
+and in pleasing him she was happy: in the knowledge that she dazzled,
+was her sense of safety.  Percy hated scandal; he heard none.  He wanted
+stirring, cheering; in her house he had it.  He came daily, and as it was
+her wish that new themes, new flights of converse, should delight him and
+show her exhaustless, to preserve her ascendancy, she welcomed him
+without consulting the world.  He was witness of Mr. Hepburn's
+presentation of a costly China vase, to repair the breach in her array
+of ornaments, and excuse a visit.  Judging by the absence of any blow
+within, he saw not a sign of coquettry.  Some such visit had been
+anticipated by the prescient woman, so there was no reddening.  She
+brought about an exchange of sentences between him and her furious
+admirer, sparing either of them a glimpse of which was the sacrifice to
+the other, amusing them both.  Dacier could allow Mr. Hepburn to outsit
+him; and he left them, proud of his absolute confidence in her.
+
+She was mistaken in imagining that her social vivacity, mixed with
+comradeship of the active intellect, was the charm which kept Mr. Percy
+Dacier temperate when he well knew her to distinguish him above her
+courtiers.  Her powers of dazzling kept him tame; they did not stamp her
+mark on him.  He was one of the order of highly polished men, ignorant of
+women, who are impressed for long terms by temporary flashes, that hold
+them bound until a fresh impression comes, to confirm or obliterate the
+preceding.  Affairs of the world he could treat competently; he had a
+head for high politics and the management of men; the feminine half of
+the world was a confusion and a vexation to his intelligence,
+characterless; and one woman at last appearing decipherable, he fancied
+it must be owing to her possession of character, a thing prized the more
+in women because of his latent doubt of its existence.  Character, that
+was the mark he aimed at; that moved him to homage as neither sparkling
+wit nor incomparable beauty, nor the unusual combination, did.  To be
+distinguished by a woman of character (beauty and wit for jewellery), was
+his minor ambition in life, and if Fortune now gratified it, he owned to
+the flattery.  It really seemed by every test that she had the quality.
+Since the day when he beheld her by the bedside of his dead uncle, and
+that one on the French sea-sands, and again at Copsley, ghostly white out
+of her wrestle with death, bleeding holy sweat of brow for her friend,
+the print of her features had been on him as an index of depth of
+character, imposing respect and admiration--a sentiment imperilled by her
+consent to fly with him.  Her subsequent reserve until they met--by an
+accident that the lady at any rate was not responsible for, proved the
+quality positively.  And the nature of her character, at first suspected,
+vanquished him more, by comparison, than her vivid intellect, which he
+originally, and still lingeringly, appreciated in condescension, as a
+singular accomplishment, thrilling at times, now and then assailably
+feminine.  But, after her consent to a proposal that caused him
+retrospective worldly shudders, and her composed recognition of the
+madness, a character capable of holding him in some awe was real majesty,
+and it rose to the clear heights, with her mental attributes for
+satellites.  His tendency to despise women was wholesomely checked by
+the experience to justify him in saying, Here is a worthy one!  She was
+health to him, as well as trusty counsel.  Furthermore, where he
+respected, he was a governed man, free of the common masculine craze to
+scale fortresses for the sake of lowering flags.  Whilst under his
+impression of her character, he submitted honourably to the ascendancy
+of a lady whose conduct suited him and whose preference flattered; whose
+presence was very refreshing; whose letters were a stimulant.  Her
+letters were really running well-waters, not a lover's delusion of the
+luminous mind of his lady.  They sparkled in review and preserved their
+integrity under critical analysis.  The reading of them hurried him in
+pursuit of her from house to house during the autumn; and as she did not
+hint at the shadow his coming cast on her, his conscience was easy.
+Regarding their future, his political anxieties were a mountainous
+defile, curtaining the outlook.  They met at Lockton, where he arrived
+after a recent consultation with his Chief, of whom, and the murmurs of
+the Cabinet, he spoke to Diana openly, in some dejection.
+
+'They might see he has been breaking with his party for the last four
+years,' she said.  'The plunge to be taken is tremendous.'
+
+'But will he?  He appears too despondent for a header.'
+
+'We cannot dance on a quaking floor.'
+
+'No; it 's exactly that quake of the floor which gives "much qualms," to
+me as well,' said Dacier.
+
+'A treble Neptune's power!' she rejoined, for his particular delectation.
+'Enough if he hesitates.  I forgive him his nausea.  He awaits the
+impetus, and it will reach him, and soon.  He will not wait for the mob
+at his heels, I am certain.  A Minister who does that, is a post, and
+goes down with the first bursting of the dam.  He has tried compromise
+and discovered that it does not appease the Fates; is not even a
+makeshift-mending at this hour.  He is a man of nerves, very sensitively
+built; as quick--quicker than a woman, I could almost say, to feel the
+tremble of the air-forerunner of imperative changes.'
+
+Dacier brightened fondly.  'You positively describe him; paint him to the
+life, without knowing him!'
+
+'I have seen him; and if I paint, whose are the colours?'
+
+'Sometimes I repeat you to him, and I get all the credit,' said Dacier.
+
+'I glow with pride to think of speaking anything that you repeat,' said
+Diana, and her eyes were proudly lustreful.
+
+Their love was nourished on these mutual flatteries. Thin food for
+passion!  The innocence of it sanctioned the meetings and the
+appointments to meet.  When separated they were interchanging letters,
+formally worded in the apostrophe and the termination, but throbbingly
+full: or Diana thought so of Percy's letters, with grateful justice; for
+his manner of opening his heart in amatory correspondence was to confide
+important, secret matters, up to which mark she sprang to reply in
+counsel.  He proved his affection by trusting her; his respect by his
+tempered style: 'A Greenland style of writing,' she had said of an
+unhappy gentleman's epistolary compositions resembling it; and now the
+same official baldness was to her mind Italianly rich; it called forth
+such volumes.
+
+Flatteries that were thin food for passion appeared the simplest
+exchanges of courtesy, and her meetings with her lover, judging by the
+nature of the discourse they held, so, consequent to their joint interest
+in the great crisis anticipated, as to rouse her indignant surprise and a
+turn for downright rebellion when the Argus world signified the fact of
+its having one eye, or more, wide open.
+
+Debit and Credit, too, her buzzing familiars, insisted on an audience at
+each ear, and at the house-door, on her return to London.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIX
+
+SHOWS THE APPROACHES OF THE POLITICAL AND THE DOMESTIC CRISIS IN COMPANY
+
+There was not much talk of Diana between Lady Dunstane and her customary
+visitor Tom Redworth now.  She was shy in speaking of the love-stricken
+woman, and more was in his mind for thought than for speech.  She some
+times wondered how much he might know, ending with the reflection that
+little passing around was unknown to him.  He had to shut his mind
+against thought, against all meditation upon Mrs. Warwick; it was based
+scientifically when speculating and calculating, on the material element
+--a talisman.  Men and women crossing the high seas of life he had found
+most readable under that illuminating inquiry, as to their means.  An
+inspector of sea worthy ships proceeds in like manner.  Whence would the
+money come?  He could not help the bent of his mind; but he could avoid
+subjecting her to the talismanic touch.  The girl at the Dublin Ball,
+the woman at the fire-grate of The Crossways, both in one were his Diana.
+Now and then, hearing an ugly whisper, his manful sympathy with the mere
+woman in her imprisoned liberty, defended her desperately from charges
+not distinctly formulated within him:--'She's not made of stone.'  That
+was a height of self-abnegation to shake the poor fellow to his roots;
+but, then, he had no hopes of his own; and he stuck to it.  Her choice of
+a man like Dacier, too, of whom Redworth judged highly, showed nobility.
+She irradiated the man; but no baseness could be in such an alliance.
+If allied, they were bound together for good.  The tie-supposing a
+villain world not wrong--was only not the sacred tie because of
+impediments.  The tie!--he deliberated, and said stoutly--No.  Men of
+Redworth's nature go through sharp contests, though the duration of them
+is short, and the tussle of his worship of this woman with the
+materialistic turn of his mind was closed by the complete shutting up of
+the latter under lock and bar; so that a man, very little of an idealist,
+was able to sustain her in the pure imagination--where she did almost
+belong to him.  She was his, in a sense, because she might have been his-
+-but for an incredible extreme of folly.  The dark ring of the eclipse
+cast by some amazing foolishness round the shining crescent perpetually
+in secret claimed the whole sphere of her, by what might have been, while
+admitting her lost to him in fact.  To Thomas Redworth's mind the lack of
+perfect sanity in his conduct at any period of manhood, was so entirely
+past belief that he flew at the circumstances confirming the charge, and
+had wrestles with the angel of reality, who did but set him dreaming
+backward, after flinging him.
+
+He heard at Lady Wathin's that Mrs. Warwick was in town for the winter.
+'Mr. Dacier is also in town,' Lady Wathin said, with an acid indication
+of the needless mention of it.  'We have not seen him.'  She invited
+Redworth to meet a few friends at dinner.  'I think you admire Miss
+Asper: in my idea a very saint among young women;--and you know what the
+young women of our day are.  She will be present.  She is, you are aware,
+England's greatest heiress.  Only yesterday, hearing of that poor man Mr.
+Warwick's desperate attack of illness--heart!--and of his having no
+relative or friend to soothe his pillow,--he is lying in absolute
+loneliness,--she offered to go and nurse him!  Of course it could not
+be done.  It is not her place.  The beauty of the character of a dear
+innocent young girl, with every gratification at command, who could make
+the offer, strikes me as unparalleled.  She was perfectly sincere--she is
+sincerity.  She asked at once, Where is he?  She wished me to accompany
+her on a first visit.  I saw a tear.'
+
+Redworth had called at Lady Wathin's for information of the state of Mr.
+Warwick, concerning which a rumour was abroad.  No stranger to the
+vagrant compassionateness of sentimentalists;--rich, idle, conscience-
+pricked or praise-catching;--he was unmoved by the tale that Miss Asper
+had proposed to go to Mr. Warwick's sick-bed in the uniform of a Sister
+of Charity.--'Speaking French!' Lady Wathin exclaimed; and his head
+rocked, as he said:
+
+'An Englishman would not be likely to know better.'
+
+'She speaks exquisite French--all European languages, Mr. Redworth.
+She does not pretend to wit.  To my thinking, depth of sentiment is
+a far more feminine accomplishment.  It assuredly will be found a
+greater treasure.'
+
+The modest man (modest in such matters) was led by degrees to fancy
+himself sounded regarding Miss Asper: a piece of sculpture glacially
+decorative of the domestic mansion in person, to his thinking; and as to
+the nature of it--not a Diana, with all her faults!
+
+If Diana had any faults, in a world and a position so heavily against
+her!  He laughed to himself, when alone, at the neatly implied bitter
+reproach cast on the wife by the forsaken young lady, who proposed to
+nurse the abandoned husband of the woman bereaving her of the man she
+loved.  Sentimentalists enjoy these tricks, the conceiving or the doing
+of them--the former mainly, which are cheaper, and equally effective.
+Miss Asper might be deficient in wit; this was a form of practical wit,
+occasionally exhibited by creatures acting on their instincts.  Warwick
+he pitied, and he put compulsion on himself to go and see the poor
+fellow, the subject of so sublime a generosity.  Mr. Warwick sat in an
+arm-chair, his legs out straight on the heels, his jaw dragging hollow
+cheeks, his hands loosely joined; improving in health, he said.  A demure
+woman of middle age was in attendance.  He did not speak of his wife.
+Three times he said disconnectedly, 'I hear reports,' and his eyelids
+worked.  Redworth talked of general affairs, without those consolatory
+efforts, useless between men, which are neither medicine nor good honest
+water:--he judged by personal feelings.  In consequence, he left an
+invalid the sourer for his visit.
+
+Next day he received a briefly-worded summons from Mrs. Warwick.
+
+Crossing the park on the line to Diana's house, he met Miss Paynham, who
+grieved to say that Mrs. Warwick could not give her a sitting; and in a
+still mournfuller tone, imagined he would find her at home, and alone by
+this time.  'I left no one but Mr. Dacier there,' she observed.
+
+'Mrs. Warwick will be disengaged to-morrow, no doubt,' he said
+consolingly.
+
+Her head performed the negative.  'They talk politics, and she becomes
+animated, loses her pose.  I will persevere, though I fear I have
+undertaken a task too much for me.'
+
+'I am deeply indebted to you for the attempt.'  Redworth bowed to her and
+set his face to the Abbey-towers, which wore a different aspect in the
+smoked grey light since his two minutes of colloquy.  He had previously
+noticed that meetings with Miss Paynham produced a similar effect on him,
+a not so very impressionable man.  And how was it done?  She told him
+nothing he did not know or guess.
+
+Diana was alone.  Her manner, after the greeting, seemed feverish.  She
+had not to excuse herself for abruptness when he heard the nature of the
+subject.  Her counsellor and friend was informed, in feminine style, that
+she had, requested him to call, for the purpose of consulting him with
+regard to a matter she had decided upon; and it was, the sale of The
+Crossways.  She said that it would have gone to her heart once; she
+supposed she had lost her affection for the place, or had got the better
+of her superstitions.  She spoke lamely as well as bluntly.  The place
+was hers, she said; her own property.  Her husband could not interdict a
+sale.
+
+Redworth addressed himself to her smothered antagonism.  'Even if he had
+rights, as they are termed .  .  .  I think you might count on their not
+being pressed.'
+
+'I have been told of illness.'  She tapped her foot on the floor.
+
+'His present state of health is unequal to his ordinary duties.'
+
+'Emma Dunstane is fully supplied with the latest intelligence, Mr.
+Redworth.  You know the source.'
+
+'I mention it simply .  .  .'
+
+'Yes, yes.  What I have to protest is, that in this respect I am free.
+The Law has me fast, but leaves me its legal view of my small property.
+I have no authority over me.  I can do as I please, in this, without a
+collision, or the dread of one.  It is the married woman's perpetual
+dread when she ventures a step.  Your Law originally presumed her a
+China-footed animal.  And more, I have a claim for maintenance.'
+
+She crimsoned angrily.
+
+Redworth showed a look of pleasure, hard to understand.  'The application
+would be sufficient, I fancy,' he said.
+
+'It should have been offered.'
+
+'Did you not decline it?'
+
+'I declined to apply for it.  I thought--But, Mr. Redworth, another
+thing, concerning us all: I want very much to hear your ideas of the
+prospects of the League; because I know you have ideas.  The leaders are
+terrible men; they fascinate me.  They appear to move with an army of
+facts.  They are certainly carrying the country.  I am obliged to think
+them sincere.  Common agitators would not hold together, as they do.
+They gather strength each year.  If their statistics are not illusory--
+an army of phantoms instead of one of facts; and they knock at my head
+without admission, I have to confess; they must win.'
+
+'Ultimately, it is quite calculable that they will win,' said Redworth;
+and he was led to discourse of rates and duties and prohibitive tariffs
+to a woman surprisingly athirst, curious for every scrap of intelligence
+relating to the power, organization, and schemes of the League.  'Common
+sense is the secret of every successful civil agitation,' he said.  'Rap
+it unremittingly on crowds of the thickest of human heads, and the
+response comes at last to sweep all before it.  You may reckon that the
+country will beat the landlords--for that is our question.  Is it one of
+your political themes?'
+
+'I am not presumptuous to such a degree:--a poor scholar,' Diana replied.
+'Women striving to lift their heads among men deserve the sarcasm.'
+
+He denied that any sarcasm was intended, and the lesson continued.  When
+she had shaped in her mind some portion of his knowledge of the subject,
+she reverted casually to her practical business.  Would he undertake to
+try to obtain a purchaser of The Crossways, at the price he might deem
+reasonable?  She left the price entirely to his judgement.  And now she
+had determined to part with the old place, the sooner the better!  She
+said that smiling; and Redworth smiled, outwardly and inwardly.  Her talk
+of her affairs was clearer to him than her curiosity for the mysteries of
+the League.  He gained kind looks besides warm thanks by the promise to
+seek a purchaser; especially by his avoidance of prying queries.  She
+wanted just this excellent automaton fac-totum; and she referred him to
+Mr. Braddock for the title-deeds, et caetera--the chirping phrase of
+ladies happily washing their hands of the mean details of business.
+
+'How of your last work?' he asked her.
+
+Serenest equanimity rejoined: 'As I anticipated, it is not popular.  The
+critics are of one mind with the public.  You may have noticed, they
+rarely flower above that rocky surface.  THE CANTATRICE sings them a
+false note.  My next will probably please them less.'
+
+Her mobile lips and brows shot the faint upper-wreath of a smile
+hovering.  It was designed to display her philosophy.
+
+'And what is the name of your next?' said he.
+
+'I name it THE MAN OF TWO MINDS, if you can allow that to be in nature.'
+
+'Contra-distinguished from the woman?'
+
+'Oh!  you must first believe the woman to have one.'
+
+'You are working on it?'
+
+'By fits.  And I forgot, Mr. Redworth: I have mislaid my receipts, and
+must ask you for the address of your wine-merchant;--or, will you?
+Several dozen of the same wines.  I can trust him to be in awe of you,
+and the good repute of my table depends on his honesty.'
+
+Redworth took the definite order for a large supply of wine.
+
+She gave him her hand: a lost hand, dear to hold, needing to be guided,
+he feared.  For him, it was merely a hand, cut off from the wrist; and he
+had performed that executive part!  A wiser man would now have been the
+lord of it .  .  .  .  So he felt, with his burning wish to protect and
+cherish the beloved woman, while saying: 'If we find a speedy bidder for
+The Crossways, you will have to thank our railways.'
+
+'You!' said Diana, confident in his ability to do every-thing of the
+practical kind.
+
+Her ingenuousness tickled him.  He missed her comic touches upon men and
+things, but the fever shown by her manner accounted for it.
+
+As soon as he left her, she was writing to the lover who had an hour
+previously been hearing her voice; the note of her theme being Party;
+and how to serve it, when to sacrifice it to the Country.  She wrote,
+carolling bars of the Puritani marches; and such will passion do, that
+her choice of music was quite in harmony with her theme.  The martially-
+amorous melodies of Italian Opera in those days fostered a passion
+challenged to intrepidity from the heart of softness; gliding at the same
+time, and putting warm blood even into dull arithmetical figures which
+might be important to her lover, her hero fronting battle.  She condensed
+Redworth's information skilfully, heartily giving it and whatever she had
+imbibed, as her own, down to the remark: 'Common sense in questions of
+justice, is a weapon that makes way into human heads and wins the certain
+majority, if we strike with it incessantly.'  Whether anything she wrote
+was her own, mattered little: the savour of Percy's praise, which none
+could share with her, made it instantly all her own.  Besides she wrote
+to strengthen him; she naturally laid her friends and the world under
+contribution; and no other sort of writing was possible.  Percy had not a
+common interest in fiction; still less for high comedy.  He liked the
+broad laugh when he deigned to open books of that sort; puns and strong
+flavours and harlequin surprises; and her work would not admit of them,
+however great her willingness to force her hand for his amusement:
+consequently her inventiveness deadened.  She had to cease whipping it.
+'My poor old London cabhorse of a pen shall go to grass!' she sighed,
+looking to the sale of The Crossways for money; looking no farther.
+
+Those marshalled battalions of Debit and Credit were in hostile order,
+the weaker simply devoted to fighting for delay, when a winged messenger
+bearing the form of old Mr. Braddock descended to her with the
+reconciling news that a hermit bachelor, an acquaintance of Mr.
+Redworth's--both of whom wore a gloomy hue in her mind immediately--had
+offered a sum for the purchase of The Crossways.  Considering the out-of-
+the-way district, Mr. Braddock thought it an excellent price to get.  She
+thought the reverse, but confessed that double the sum would not have
+altered her opinion.  Double the sum scarcely counted for the service she
+required of it for much more than a year.  The money was paid shortly
+after into her Bank, and then she enjoyed the contemptuous felicity of
+tossing meat to her lions, tigers, wolves, and jackals, who, but for the
+fortunate intervention, would have been feeding on her.  These menagerie
+beasts of prey were the lady's tradesmen, Debit's hungry-brood.  She had
+a rapid glimpse of a false position in regarding that legitimate band so
+scornfully: another glimpse likewise of a day to come when they might not
+be stopped at the door.  She was running a race with something; with
+what?  It was unnamed; it ran in a shroud.
+
+At times she surprised her heart violently beating when there had not
+been a thought to set it in motion.  She traced it once to the words,
+'next year,' incidentally mentioned.  'Free,' was a word that checked her
+throbs, as at a question of life or death.  Her solitude, excepting the
+hours of sleep, if then, was a time of irregular breathing.  The
+something unnamed, running beside her, became a dreadful familiar; the
+race between them past contemplation for ghastliness.  'But this is your
+Law!' she cried to the world, while blinding her eyes against a peep of
+the shrouded features.
+
+Singularly, she had but to abandon hope, and the shadowy figure vanished,
+the tragic race was ended.  How to live and think, and not to hope: the
+slave of passion had this problem before her.
+
+Other tasks were supportable, though one seemed hard at moments and was
+not passive; it attacked her.  The men and women of her circle
+derisively, unanimously, disbelieved in an innocence that forfeited
+reputation.  Women were complimentarily assumed to be not such gaping
+idiots.  And as the weeks advanced, a change came over Percy.  The
+gentleman had grown restless at covert congratulations, hollow to his
+knowledge, however much caressing vanity, and therefore secretly a wound
+to it.  One day, after sitting silent, he bluntly proposed to break 'this
+foolish trifling'; just in his old manner, though not so honourably; not
+very definitely either.  Her hand was taken.
+
+'I feared that dumbness!' Diana said, letting her hand go, but keeping
+her composure.  'My friend Percy, I am not a lion-tamer, and if you are
+of those animals, we break the chapter.  Plainly you think that where
+there appears to be a choice of fools, the woman is distinctly designed
+for the person.  Drop my hand, or I shall repeat the fable of the Goose
+with the Golden Eggs.'
+
+'Fables are applicable only in the school-room,' said he; and he ventured
+on 'Tony!'
+
+'I vowed an oath to my dear Emma--as good as to the heavens!  and that
+of itself would stay me from being insane again.'  She released herself.
+'Signor Percy, you teach me to suspect you of having an idle wish to
+pluck your plaything to pieces:--to boast of it?  Ah! my friend, I
+fancied I was of more value to you.  You must come less often; even to
+not at all, if you are one of those idols with feet of clay which leave
+the print of their steps in a room; or fall and crush the silly
+idolizer.'
+
+'But surely you know .  .  .'  said he.  'We can't have to wait long.'
+He looked full of hopeful meanings.
+
+'A reason .  .  .  !' She kept down her breath.  A longdrawn sigh
+followed, through parted lips.  She had a sensation of horror.
+'And I cannot propose to nurse him--Emma will not hear of it,' she said.
+'I dare not.  Hypocrite to that extreme?  Oh, no!  But I must hear
+nothing.  As it is, I am haunted.  Now let this pass.  Tony me no Tonies;
+I am stony to such whimpering business now we are in the van of the
+struggle.  All round us it sounds like war.  Last night I had Mr. Tonans
+dining here;--he wished to meet you; and you must have a private meeting
+with Mr. Whitmonby: he will be useful; others as well.  You are wrong in
+affecting contempt of the Press.  It perches you on a rock; but the
+swimmer in politics knows what draws the tides.  Your own people, your
+set, your class, are a drag to you, like inherited superstitions to the
+wakening brain.  The greater the glory!  For you see the lead you take?
+You are saving your class.  They should lead, and will, if they prove
+worthy in the crisis.  Their curious error is to believe in the stability
+of a monumental position.'
+
+'Perfectly true!' cried Dacier; and the next minute, heated by
+approbation, was begging for her hand earnestly.  She refused it.
+
+'But you say things that catch me!' he pleaded.  'Remember, it was nearly
+mine.  It soon will be mine.  I heard yesterday from Lady Wathin .  .  .
+well, if it pains you!'
+
+'Speak on,' said Diana, resigned to her thirsty ears.
+
+'He is not expected to last through the autumn.'
+
+'The calculation is hers?'
+
+'Not exactly:--judging from the symptoms.'
+
+Diana flashed a fiery eye into Dacier's, and rose.  She was past danger
+of melting, with her imagination darkened by the funeral image; but she
+craved solitude, and had to act the callous, to dismiss him.
+
+'Good.  Enough for the day.  Now leave me, if you please.  When we meet
+again, stifle that raven's croak.  I am not a "Sister of Charity,"
+but neither am I a vulture hovering for the horse in the desert to die.
+A poor simile!--when it is my own and not another's breath that I want.
+Nothing in nature, only gruesome German stories will fetch comparisons
+for the yoke of this Law of yours.  It seems the nightmare dream
+following an ogre's supper.'
+
+She was not acting the shiver of her frame.
+
+To-morrow was open to him, and prospect of better fortune, so he
+departed, after squeezing the hand she ceremoniously extended.
+
+But her woman's intuition warned her that she had not maintained the
+sovereign impression which was her security.  And hope had become a flame
+in her bosom that would no longer take the common extinguisher.  The race
+she ran was with a shrouded figure no more, but with the figure of the
+shroud; she had to summon paroxysms of a pity hard to feel, images of
+sickness, helplessness, the vaults, the last human silence for the
+stilling of her passionate heart.  And when this was partly effected, the
+question, Am I going to live?  renewed her tragical struggle.  Who was it
+under the vaults, in the shroud, between the planks?  and with human
+sensibility to swell the horror!  Passion whispered of a vaster sorrow
+needed for herself; and the hope conjuring those frightful complexities
+was needed to soothe her.  She pitied the man, but she was an enamoured
+woman.  Often of late she had been sharply stung, relaxed as well, by the
+observations of Danvers assisting at her toilette.  Had she beauty and
+charm, beauty and rich health in the young summer blooming of her days?
+--and all doomed to waste?  No insurgency of words arose in denunciation
+of the wrong done to her nature.  An undefined heavy feeling of wrong
+there was, just perceptive enough to let her know, without gravely
+shaming, that one or another must be slain for peace to come; for it is
+the case in which the world of the Laws overloading her is pitiless to
+women, deaf past ear-trumpets, past intercession; detesting and reviling
+them for a feeble human cry, and for one apparent step of revolt piling
+the pelted stones on them.  It will not discriminate shades of hue, it
+massacres all the shadowed.  They are honoured, after a fashion, at a
+certain elevation.  Descending from it, and purely to breathe common air
+(thus in her mind), they are scourged and outcast.  And alas!  the very
+pleading for them excites a sort of ridicule in their advocate.  How?
+She was utterly, even desperately, nay personally, earnest, and her
+humour closed her lips; though comical views of the scourged and outcast
+coming from the opposite party--the huge bully world--she would not have
+tolerated.  Diana raged at a prevailing strength on the part of that huge
+bully world, which seemed really to embrace the atmosphere.  Emma had
+said: 'The rules of Christian Society are a blessed Government for us
+women.  We owe it so much that there is not a brick of the fabric we
+should not prop.'  Emma's talk of obedience to the Laws, being Laws, was
+repeated by the rebel, with an involuntary unphrased comparison of the
+vessel in dock and the vessel at sea.
+
+When Dacier next called to see Mrs. Warwick, he heard that she had gone
+to Copsley for a couple of weeks.  The lesson was emphasized by her not
+writing:--and was it the tricky sex, or the splendid character of the
+woman, which dealt him this punishment?  Knowing how much  Diana
+forfeited for him, he was moved to some enthusiasm, despite his
+inclination to be hurt.
+
+She, on her return to London, gained a considerable increase of knowledge
+as to her position in the eye of the world; and unlike the result of her
+meditations derived from the clamouring tradesmen, whom she could excuse,
+she was neither illuminated nor cautioned by that dubious look; she
+conscientiously revolted.  Lady Pennon hinted a word for her Government.
+'A good deal of what you so capitally call "Green tea talk" is going on,
+my dear.'  Diana replied, without pretending to misunderstand.
+
+'Gossip is a beast of prey that does not wait for the death of the
+creature it devours.  They are welcome to my shadow, if the liberty I
+claim casts one, and it feeds them.'  To which the old lady rejoined:
+'Oh! I am with you through thick and thin.  I presented you at Court, and
+I stand by you.  Only, walk carefully.  Women have to walk with a train.
+You are too famous not to have your troops of watchers.'
+
+'But I mean to prove,' said Diana, 'that a woman can walk with her train
+independent of the common reserves and artifices.'
+
+'Not on highways, my dear!'
+
+Diana, praising the speaker, referred the whole truth in that to the
+material element of her metaphor.
+
+She was more astonished by Whitmonby's candid chiding; but with him she
+could fence, and men are easily diverted.  She had sent for him, to bring
+him and Percy Dacier together to a conference.  Unaware of the project,
+he took the opportunity of their privacy to speak of the great station
+open to her in London being imperilled; and he spoke of 'tongues,' and
+ahem!  A very little would have induced him to fill that empty vocable
+with a name.
+
+She had to pardon the critic in him for an unpleasant review of her
+hapless CANTATRICE; and as a means of evasion, she mentioned the poor
+book and her slaughter of the heroine, that he had complained of.
+
+'I killed her; I could not let her live.  You were unjust in accusing the
+authoress of heartlessness.'
+
+'If I did, I retract,' said he.  'She steers too evidently from the
+centre of the vessel.  She has the organ in excess.'
+
+'Proof that it is not squandered.'
+
+'The point concerns direction.'
+
+'Have I made so bad a choice of my friends?'
+
+'It is the common error of the sprightly to suppose that in parrying a
+thrust they blind our eyes.'
+
+'The world sees always what it desires to see, Mr. Whitmonby.'
+
+'The world, my dear Mrs. Warwick, is a blundering machine upon its own
+affairs, but a cruel sleuth-hound to rouse in pursuit.'
+
+'So now you have me chased by sight and scent.  And if I take wing?'
+
+'Shots!  volleys!--You are lawful game.  The choice you have made of your
+friends, should oblige you to think of them.'
+
+'I imagine I do.  Have I offended any, or one?'
+
+'I will not say that.  You know the commotion in a French kitchen when
+the guests of the house declined a particular dish furnished them by
+command.  The cook and his crew were loyal to their master, but, for the
+love of their Art, they sent him notice.  It is ill serving a mad
+sovereign.'
+
+Diana bowed to the compact little apologue.
+
+'I will tell you another story, traditional in our family from my great-
+grandmother, a Spanish woman,' she said.  'A cavalier serenaded his
+mistress, and rascal mercenaries fell upon him before he could draw
+sword.  He battered his guitar on their pates till the lattice opened
+with a cry, and startled them to flight.  "Thrice blessed and beloved!"
+he called to her above, in reference to the noise, "it was merely a
+diversion of the accompaniment."  Now there was loyal service to a
+sovereign!'
+
+'You are certainly an angel!' exclaimed Whitmonby.  'I swallow the story,
+and leave it to digestion to discover the appositeness.  Whatever tuneful
+instrument one of your friends possesses shall solace your slumbers or
+batter the pate of your enemy.  But discourage the habitual serenader.'
+
+'The musician you must mean is due here now, by appointment to meet you,'
+said Diana, and set him momentarily agape with the name of Mr. Percy
+Dacier.
+
+That was the origin of the alliance between the young statesman and a
+newspaper editor.  Whitmonby, accepting proposals which suited him,
+quitted the house, after an hour of political talk, no longer inclined to
+hint at the 'habitual serenader,' but very ready to fall foul of those
+who did, as he proved when the numbers buzzed openly.  Times were
+masculine; the excitement on the eve of so great a crisis, and Diana's
+comprehension of it and fine heading cry, put that weak matter aside.
+Moreover, he was taught to suppose himself as welcome a guest as Dacier;
+and the cook could stand criticism; the wines--wonderful to say of a
+lady's table--were trusty; the talk, on the political evenings and the
+social and anecdotal supper-nights, ran always in perfect accord with his
+ideal of the conversational orchestra: an improvized harmony, unmatched
+elsewhere.  She did not, he considered, so perfectly assort her dinner-
+guests; that was her one fault.  She had therefore to strain her
+adroitness to cover their deficiencies and fuse them.  But what other
+woman could have done it!  She led superbly.  If an Irishman was present,
+she kept him from overflooding, managed to extract just the flavour of
+him, the smack of salt.  She did even, at Whitmonby's table, on a red-
+letter Sunday evening, in concert with him and the Dean, bring down that
+cataract, the Bodleian, to the levels of interchanging dialogue by
+seasonable touches, inimitably done, and never done before.  Sullivan
+Smith, unbridled in the middle of dinner, was docile to her.  'Irishmen;'
+she said, pleading on their behalf to Whitmonby, who pronounced the race
+too raw for an Olympian feast, 'are invaluable if you hang them up to
+smoke and cure'; and the master of social converse could not deny that
+they were responsive to her magic.  The supper-nights were mainly devoted
+to Percy's friends.  He brought as many as he pleased, and as often as it
+pleased him; and it was her pride to provide Cleopatra banquets for the
+lover whose anxieties were soothed by them, and to whom she sacrificed
+her name willingly in return for a generosity that certain chance
+whispers of her heart elevated to the pitch of measureless.
+
+So they wore through the Session and the Autumn, clouds heavier, the
+League drumming, the cry of Ireland 'ominously Banshee,' as she wrote to
+Emma.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXX
+
+IN WHICH THERE IS A TASTE OF A LITTLE DINNER AND AN AFTERTASTE
+
+'But Tony lives!' Emma Dunstane cried, on her solitary height, with the
+full accent of envy marking the verb; and when she wrote enviously to her
+friend of the life among bright intelligences, and of talk worth hearing,
+it was a happy signification that health, frail though it might be, had
+grown importunate for some of the play of life.  Diana sent her word to
+name her day, and she would have her choicest to meet her dearest.  They
+were in the early days of December, not the best of times for improvized
+gatherings.  Emma wanted, however, to taste them as they cropped; she was
+also, owing to her long isolation, timid at a notion of encountering the
+pick of the London world, prepared by Tony to behold 'a wonder more than
+worthy of them,' as her friend unadvisedly wrote.  That was why she came
+unexpectedly, and for a mixture of reasons, went to an hotel.  Fatality
+designed it so.  She was reproached, but she said: 'You have to write or
+you entertain at night; I should be a clog and fret you.  My hotel is
+Maitland's; excellent; I believe I am to lie on the pillow where a
+crowned head reposed!  You will perceive that I am proud as well as
+comfortable.  And I would rather meet your usual set of guests.'
+
+'The reason why I have been entertaining at night is, that Percy is
+harassed and requires enlivening,' said Diana.  'He brings his friends.
+My house is open to them, if it amuses him.  What the world says, is past
+a thought.  I owe him too much.'
+
+Emma murmured that the world would soon be pacified.
+
+Diana shook her head.  'The poor man is better; able to go about his
+affairs; and I am honestly relieved.  It lays a spectre.  As for me, I do
+not look ahead.  I serve as a kind of secretary to Percy.  I labour at
+making abstracts by day, and at night preside at my suppertable.  You
+would think it monotonous; no incident varies the course we run.  I have
+no time to ask whether it is happiness.  It seems to bear a resemblance.'
+
+Emma replied: 'He may be everything you tell me.  He should not have
+chosen the last night of the Opera to go to your box and sit beside you
+till the fall of the curtain.  The presence at the Opera of a man
+notoriously indifferent to music was enough in itself.'
+
+Diana smiled with languor.  'You heard of that?  But the Opera was The
+Puritani, my favourite.  And he saw me sitting in Lady Pennon's box
+alone.  We were compromised neck-deep already.  I can kiss you, my own
+Emmy, till I die; 'but what the world says, is what the wind says.
+Besides he has his hopes....  If I am blackened ever so thickly, he can
+make me white.  Dear me!  if the world knew that he comes here almost
+nightly!  It will; and does it matter?  I am his in soul; the rest is
+waste-paper--a half-printed sheet.'
+
+'Provided he is worthy of such devotion!'
+
+'He is absolute worthiness.  He is the prince of men: I dread to say,
+mine!  for fear.  But Emmy will not judge him to-morrow by contrast with
+more voluble talkers.--I can do anything but read poetry now.  That kills
+me!--See him through me.  In nature, character, intellect, he has no
+rival.  Whenever I despond--and it comes now and then--I rebuke myself
+with this one admonition.
+
+Simply to have known him!  Admit that for a woman to find one who is
+worthy among the opposite creatures, is a happy termination of her quest,
+and in some sort dismisses her to the Shades, an uncomplaining ferry-
+bird.  If my end were at hand I should have no cause to lament it.  We
+women miss life only when we have to confess we have never met the man to
+reverence.'
+
+Emma had to hear a very great deal of Mr. Percy.  Diana's comparison of
+herself to 'the busy bee at a window-pane,' was more in her old manner;
+and her friend would have hearkened to the marvels of the gentle man less
+unrefreshed, had it not appeared to her that her Tony gave in excess for
+what was given in return.  She hinted her view.  .  .
+
+'It is expected of our sex,' Diana said.
+
+The work of busy bee at a window-pane had at any rate not spoilt her
+beauty, though she had voluntarily, profitlessly, become this man's
+drudge, and her sprightly fancy, her ready humour and darting look all
+round in discussion, were rather deadened.
+
+But the loss was not perceptible in the circle of her guests.  Present
+at a dinner little indicating the last, were Whitmonby, in lively trim
+for shuffling, dealing, cutting, trumping or drawing trumps; Westlake,
+polishing epigrams under his eyelids; Henry Wilmers, who timed an
+anecdote to strike as the passing hour without freezing the current;
+Sullivan Smith, smoked, cured and ready to flavour; Percy Dacier,
+pleasant listener, measured speaker; and young Arthur Rhodes, the
+neophyte of the hostess's training; of whom she had said to Emma, 'The
+dear boy very kindly serves to frank an unlicenced widow'; and whom she
+prompted and made her utmost of, with her natural tact.  These she mixed
+and leavened.  The talk was on high levels and low; an enchantment to
+Emma Dunstane: now a story; a question opening new routes, sharp sketches
+of known personages; a paradox shot by laughter as soon as uttered; and
+all so smoothly; not a shadow of the dominant holder-forth or a momentary
+prospect of dead flats; the mellow ring of appositeness being the
+concordant note of deliveries running linked as they flashed, and a
+tolerant philosophy of the sage in the world recurrently the keynote.
+
+Once only had Diana to protect her nurseling.  He cited a funny line
+from a recent popular volume of verse, in perfect A propos, looking at
+Sullivan Smith; who replied, that the poets had become too many for him,
+and he read none now.  Diana said: 'There are many Alexanders, but
+Alexander of Macedon is not dwarfed by the number.'  She gave him an
+opening for a smarter reply, but he lost it in a comment--against
+Whitmonby's cardinal rule: 'The neatest turn of the wrist that ever swung
+a hero to crack a crown!' and he bowed to young Rhodes: 'I 'll read your
+versicler to-morrow morning early.'  The latter expressed a fear that the
+hour was too critical for poetry.
+
+'I have taken the dose at a very early hour,' said Whitmonby, to bring
+conversation to the flow again, 'and it effaced the critical mind
+completely.'
+
+'But did not silence the critical nose,' observed Westlake.
+
+Wilmers named the owner of the longest nose in Europe.
+
+'Potentially, indeed a critic!' said Diana.
+
+'Nights beside it must be fearful, and good matter for a divorce, if the
+poor dear lady could hale it to the doors of the Vatican!' Sullivan Smith
+exclaimed.  'But there's character in noses.'
+
+'Calculable by inches?' Dacier asked.
+
+'More than in any other feature,' said Lady Dunstane.  'The Riffords are
+all prodigiously gifted and amusing: suspendens omnia naso.  It should be
+prayed for in families.'
+
+'Totum ut to faciant, Fabulle, nasum,' rejoined Whitmonby.  'Lady
+Isabella was reading the tale of the German princess, who had a sentinel
+stationed some hundred yards away to whisk off the flies, and she owned
+to me that her hand instinctively travelled upward.'
+
+'Candour is the best concealment, when one has to carry a saddle of
+absurdity,' said Diana.  'Touchstone's "poor thing, but mine own," is
+godlike in its enveloping fold.'
+
+'The most comforting sermon ever delivered on property in poverty,' said
+Arthur Rhodes.
+
+Westlake assented.  'His choice of Audrey strikes me as an exhibition of
+the sure instinct for pasture of the philosophical jester in a forest.'
+
+' With nature's woman, if he can find her, the urban seems equally at
+home,' said Lady Dunstane.
+
+'Baron Pawle is an example,' added Whitmonby.  'His cook is a pattern
+wife to him.  I heard him say at table that she was responsible for all
+except the wines.  "I wouldn't have them on my conscience, with a Judge!"
+my lady retorted.'
+
+'When poor Madame de Jacquieres was dying,' said Wilmers, 'her confessor
+sat by her bedside, prepared for his ministrations.  "Pour commencer, mon
+ami, jamais je n'ai fait rien hors nature."'
+
+Lord Wadaster had uttered something tolerably similar: 'I am a sinner,
+and in good society.'  Sir Abraham Hartiston, a minor satellite of the
+Regent, diversified this: 'I am a sinner, and go to good society.'
+Madame la Comtesse de la Roche-Aigle, the cause of many deaths, declared
+it unwomanly to fear anything save 'les revenants.'  Yet the countess
+could say the pretty thing: 'Foot on a flower, then think of me!'
+
+'Sentimentality puts up infant hands for absolution,' said Diana.
+
+'But tell me,' Lady Dunstane inquired generally, 'why men are so much
+happier than women in laughing at their spouses?'
+
+They are humaner, was one dictum; they are more frivolous, ironically
+another.
+
+'It warrants them for blowing the bugle-horn of masculine superiority
+night and morning from the castle-walls,' Diana said.
+
+'I should imagine it is for joy of heart that they still have cause to
+laugh!' said Westlake.
+
+On the other hand, are women really pained by having to laugh at their
+lords?  Curious little speeches flying about the great world, affirmed
+the contrary.  But the fair speakers were chartered libertines, and their
+laugh admittedly had a biting acid.  The parasite is concerned in the
+majesty of the tree.
+
+'We have entered Botany Bay,' Diana said to Emma; who answered: 'A
+metaphor is the Deus ex machine, of an argument'; and Whitmonby, to
+lighten a shadow of heaviness, related allusively an anecdote of the Law
+Courts.  Sullivan Smith begged permission to 'black cap' it with Judge
+FitzGerald's sentence upon a convicted criminal: 'Your plot was perfect
+but for One above.'  Dacier cited an execrable impromptu line of the
+Chief of the Opposition in Parliament.  The Premier, it was remarked,
+played him like an angler his fish on the hook; or say, Mr. Serjeant
+Rufus his witness in the box.
+
+'Or a French journalist an English missionary,' said Westlake; and as the
+instance was recent it was relished.
+
+The talk of Premiers offered Whitmonby occasion for a flight to the Court
+of Vienna and Kaunitz.  Wilmers told a droll story of Lord Busby's
+missing the Embassy there.  Westlake furnished a sample of the tranquil
+sententiousness of Busby's brother Robert during a stormy debate in the
+House of Commons.
+
+'I remember,' Dacier was reminded, 'hearing him say, when the House
+resembled a Chartist riot, "Let us stand aside and meditate on Life.  If
+Youth could know, in the season of its reaping of the Pleasures, that it
+is but sowing Doctor's bills!"'
+
+Latterly a malady had supervened, and Bob Busby had retired from the
+universal to the special;--his mysterious case.
+
+'Assure him, that is endemic.  He may be cured of his desire for the
+exposition of it,' said Lady Dunstane.
+
+Westlake chimed with her: 'Yes, the charm in discoursing of one's case is
+over when the individual appears no longer at odds with Providence.'
+
+'But then we lose our Tragedy,' said Whitmonby.
+
+'Our Comedy too,' added Diana.  'We must consent to be Busbied for the
+sake of the instructive recreations.'
+
+'A curious idea, though,' said Sullivan Smith, 'that some of the grand
+instructive figures were in their day colossal bores!'
+
+'So you see the marvel of the poet's craft at last?' Diana smiled on him,
+and he vowed: 'I'll read nothing else for a month!' Young Rhodes bade him
+beware of a deluge in proclaiming it.
+
+They rose from table at ten, with the satisfaction of knowing that
+they had not argued, had not wrangled, had never stagnated, and were
+digestingly refreshed; as it should be among grown members of the
+civilized world, who mean to practise philosophy, making the hour of
+the feast a balanced recreation and a regeneration of body and mind.
+
+'Evenings like these are worth a pilgrimage,' Emma said, embracing Tony
+outside the drawing-room door.  'I am so glad I came: and if I am strong
+enough, invite me again in the Spring.  To-morrow early I start for
+Copsley, to escape this London air.  I shall hope to have you there
+soon.'
+
+She was pleased by hearing Tony ask her whether she did not think that
+Arthur Rhodes had borne himself well; for it breathed of her simply
+friendly soul.
+
+The gentlemen followed Lady Dunstane in a troop, Dacier yielding perforce
+the last adieu to young Rhodes.
+
+Five minutes later Diana was in her dressing-room, where she wrote at
+night, on the rare occasions now when she was left free for composition.
+Beginning to dwell on THE MAN OF TWO MINDS, she glanced at the woman
+likewise divided, if not similarly; and she sat brooding.  She did not
+accuse her marriage of being the first fatal step: her error was the step
+into Society without the wherewithal to support her position there.
+Girls of her kind, airing their wings above the sphere of their birth,
+are cryingly adventuresses.  As adventuresses they are treated.
+
+Vain to be shrewish with the world!  Rather let us turn and scold our
+nature for irreflectively rushing to the cream and honey!  Had she
+subsisted on her small income in a country cottage, this task of writing
+would have been holiday.  Or better, if, as she preached to Mary Paynham,
+she had apprenticed herself to some productive craft.  The simplicity of
+the life of labour looked beautiful.  What will not look beautiful
+contrasted with the fly in the web?  She had chosen to be one of the
+flies of life.
+
+Instead of running to composition, her mind was eloquent with a sermon
+to Arthur Rhodes, in Redworth's vein; more sympathetically, of course.
+'For I am not one of the lecturing Mammonites!' she could say.
+
+She was far from that.  Penitentially, in the thick of her disdain of the
+arrogant money-Betters, she pulled out a drawer where her bank-book lay,
+and observed it contemplatively; jotting down a reflection before the
+dread book of facts was opened: 'Gaze on the moral path you should have
+taken, you are asked for courage to commit a sanctioned suicide, by
+walking back to it stripped--a skeleton self.'  She sighed forth: 'But I
+have no courage: I never had!'  The book revealed its tale in a small
+pencilled computation of the bank-clerk's; on the peccant side.  Credit
+presented many pages blanks.  She seemed to have withdrawn from the
+struggle with such a partner.
+
+It signified an immediate appeal to the usurers, unless the publisher
+could be persuaded, with three parts of the book in his hands, to come to
+the rescue.  Work! roared old Debit, the sinner turned slavedriver.
+
+Diana smoothed her wrists, compressing her lips not to laugh at the
+simulation of an attitude of combat.  She took up her pen.
+
+And strange to think, she could have flowed away at once on the stuff
+that Danvers delighted to read!--wicked princes, rogue noblemen, titled
+wantons, daisy and lily innocents, traitorous marriages, murders, a
+gallows dangling a corpse dotted by a moon, and a woman bowed beneath.
+She could have written, with the certainty that in the upper and the
+middle as well as in the lower classes of the country, there would be a
+multitude to read that stuff, so cordially, despite the gaps between
+them, are they one in their literary tastes.  And why should they not
+read it?  Her present mood was a craving for excitement; for incident,
+wild action, the primitive machinery of our species; any amount of
+theatrical heroics, pathos, and clown-gabble.  A panorama of scenes came
+sweeping round her.
+
+She was, however, harnessed to a different kind of vehicle, and had to
+drag it.  The sound of the house-door shutting, imagined perhaps, was a
+fugitive distraction.  Now to animate The Man of Two Minds!
+
+He is courting, but he is burdened with the task of tasks.  He has an
+ideal of womanhood and of the union of couples: a delicacy extreme as his
+attachment: and he must induce the lady to school herself to his ideal,
+not allowing her to suspect him less devoted to her person; while she,
+an exacting idol, will drink any quantity of idealization as long as he
+starts it from a full acceptance of her acknowledged qualities.  Diana
+could once have tripped the scene along airily.  She stared at the
+opening sentence, a heavy bit of moralized manufacture, fit to yoke
+beside that on her view of her bank-book.
+
+'It has come to this--I have no head,' she cried.
+
+And is our public likely to muster the slightest taste for comic analysis
+that does not tumble to farce?  The doubt reduced her whole MS. to a
+leaden weight, composed for sinking.  Percy's addiction to burlesque was
+a further hindrance, for she did not perceive how her comedy could be
+strained to gratify it.
+
+There was a knock, and Danvers entered.  'You have apparently a liking
+for late hours,' observed her mistress.  'I told you to go to bed.'  'It
+is Mr. Dacier,' said Danvers.  'He wishes to see me?'  'Yes, ma'am.  He
+apologized for disturbing you.'  'He must have some good reason.'  What
+could it be!  Diana's glass approved her appearance.  She pressed the
+black swell of hair above her temples, rather amazed, curious, inclined
+to a beating of the heart.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXI
+
+A CHAPTER CONTAINING GREAT POLITICAL NEWS AND THEREWITH AN INTRUSION OF
+THE LOVE-GOD
+
+Dacier was pacing about the drawing-room, as in a place too narrow for
+him.
+
+Diana stood at the door.  'Have you forgotten to tell me anything I ought
+to know?'
+
+He came up to her and shut the door softly behind her, holding her hand.
+'You are near it.  I returned .  .  But tell me first:--You were slightly
+under a shadow this evening, dejected.'
+
+'Did I show it?'
+
+She was growing a little suspicious, but this cunning touch of lover-like
+interest dispersed the shade.
+
+'To me you did.'
+
+'It was unpardonable to let it be seen.'
+
+'No one else could have observed it.'
+
+Her woman's heart was thrilled; for she had concealed the dejection from
+Emma.
+
+'It was nothing,' she said; 'a knot in the book I am writing.  We poor
+authors are worried now and then.  But you?'
+
+His face rippled by degrees brightly, to excite a reflection in hers.
+
+'Shall I tune you with good news?  I think it will excuse me for coming
+back.'
+
+'Very good news?'
+
+'Brave news, as far as it goes.'
+
+'Then it concerns you!'
+
+'Me, you, the country.'
+
+'Oh! do I guess?' cried Diana.  'But speak, pray; I burn.'
+
+'What am I to have for telling it?'
+
+'Put no price.  You know my heart.  I guess--or fancy.  It relates to
+your Chief?'
+
+Dacier smiled in a way to show the lock without the key; and she was
+insensibly drawn nearer to him, speculating on the smile.
+
+'Try again,' said he, keenly appreciating the blindness to his motive of
+her studious dark eyes, and her open-lipped breathing.
+
+'Percy!  I must be right.'
+
+'Well, you are.  He has decided!'
+
+'Oh! that is the bravest possible.  When did you hear?'
+
+'He informed me of his final decision this afternoon.'
+
+'And you were charged with the secret all the evening, and betrayed not a
+sign!  I compliment the diplomatic statesman.  But when will it be
+public?'
+
+'He calls Parliament together the first week of next month.'
+
+'The proposal is--?  No more compromises!'
+
+'Total!'
+
+Diana clapped hands; and her aspect of enthusiasm was intoxicating.
+'He is a wise man and a gallant Minister!  And while you were reading me
+through, I was blind to you,' she added meltingly.
+
+'I have not made too much of it?' said he.
+
+'Indeed you have not.'
+
+She was radiant with her dark lightnings, yet visibly subject to him
+under the spell of the news he had artfully lengthened out to excite and
+overbalance her:--and her enthusiasm was all pointed to his share in the
+altered situation, as he well knew and was flattered in knowing.
+
+'So Tony is no longer dejected?  I thought I could freshen you and get my
+excuse.'
+
+'Oh! a high wind will make a dead leaf fly like a bird.  I soar.  Now I
+do feel proud.  I have longed for it--to have you leading the country:
+not tugged at like a waggon with a treble team uphill.  We two are a
+month in advance of all England.  You stand by him?--only to hear it, for
+I am sure of it!'
+
+'We stand or fall together.'
+
+Her glowing look doated on the faithful lieutenant.
+
+'And if the henchman is my hero, I am but a waiting-woman.  But I must
+admire his leader.'
+
+'Tony!'
+
+'Ah! no,' she joined her hands, wondering whither her armed majesty had
+fled; 'no softness!  no payments!  Flatter me by letting me think you
+came to a head not a silly woman's heart, with one name on it, as it has
+not to betray.  I have been frank; you need no proofs .  .  .'  The
+supplicating hands left her figure an easy prey to the storm, and were
+crushed in a knot on her bosom.  She could only shrink.  'Ah!  Percy .  .
+you undo my praise of you--my pride in receiving you.'
+
+They were speechless perforce.
+
+'You see, Tony, my dearest, I am flesh and blood after all.'
+
+'You drive me to be ice and door-bolts!'
+
+Her eyes broke over him reproachfully.
+
+'It is not so much to grant,' he murmured.
+
+'It changes everything between us.'
+
+'Not me.  It binds me the faster.'
+
+'It makes me a loathsome hypocrite.'
+
+'But, Tony!  is it so much?'
+
+'Not if you value it low.'
+
+'But how long do you keep me in this rag-puppet's state of suspension?'
+
+'Patience.'
+
+'Dangling and swinging day and night!'
+
+'The rag-puppet shall be animated and repaid if I have life.  I wish to
+respect my hero.  Have a little mercy.  Our day will come: perhaps as
+wonderfully as this wonderful news.  My friend, drop your hands.  Have
+you forgotten who I am?  I want to think, Percy!'
+
+'But you are mine.'
+
+'You are abasing your own.'
+
+'No, by heaven!'
+
+'Worse, dear friend; you are lowering yourself to the woman who loves
+you.'
+
+'You must imagine me superhuman.'
+
+'I worship you--or did.'
+
+'Be reasonable, Tony.  What harm!  Surely a trifle of recompense?  Just
+to let me feel I live!  You own you love me.  Then I am your lover.'
+
+'My dear friend Percy, when I have consented to be your paramour, this
+kind of treatment of me will not want apologies.'
+
+The plain speaking from the wound he dealt her was effective with a
+gentleman who would never have enjoyed his privileges had he been of a
+nature unsusceptible to her distinct wish and meaning.
+
+He sighed.  'You know how my family bother me.  The woman I want, the
+only woman I could marry, I can't have.'
+
+'You have her in soul.'
+
+'Body and soul, it must be!  I believe you were made without fire.'
+
+'Perhaps.  The element is omitted with some of us happily, some think.
+Now we can converse.  There seems to be a measurement of distances
+required before men and women have a chance with their brains:--or before
+a man will understand that he can be advised and seconded.  When will the
+Cabinet be consulted?'
+
+'Oh, a few days.  Promise me .  .  .'
+
+'Any honourable promise!'
+
+'You will not keep me waiting longer than the end of the Session?'
+
+'Probably there will be an appeal to the country.'
+
+'In any case, promise me: have some compassion.'
+
+'Ah, the compassion!  You do not choose your words, Percy, or forget who
+is the speaker.'
+
+'It is Tony who forgets the time she has kept her lover dangling.
+Promise, and I will wait.'
+
+'You hurt my hand, sir.'
+
+'I could crack the knuckles.  Promise!'
+
+'Come to me to-morrow.'
+
+'To-morrow you are in your armour-triple brass!  All creation cries out
+for now.  We are mounted on barbs and you talk of ambling.'
+
+'Arthur Rhodes might have spoken that.'
+
+'Rhodes!' he shook off the name in disgust.  'Pet him as much as you
+like; don't .  .  .'  he was unable to phrase his objection.
+
+She cooled him further with eulogies of the chevaleresque manner of
+speaking which young Mr. Rhodes could assume; till for very wrath of
+blood--not jealousy: he had none of any man, with her; and not passion;
+the little he had was a fitful gust--he punished her coldness by taking
+what hastily could be gathered.
+
+Her shape was a pained submission; and she thought: Where is the woman
+who ever knows a man!--as women do think when one of their artifices of
+evasion with a lover, or the trick of imposingness, has apparently been
+subduing him.  But the pain was less than previously, for she was now
+mistress of herself, fearing no abysses.
+
+Dacier released her quickly, saying: 'If I come tomorrow, shall I have
+the promise?'
+
+She answered: 'Be sure I shall not lie.'
+
+'Why not let me have it before I go?'
+
+'My friend, to tell you the truth, you have utterly distracted me.'
+
+'Forgive me if I did hurt your hand.'
+
+'The hand?  You might strike it off.'
+
+'I can't be other than a mortal lover, Tony.  There's the fact.'
+
+'No; the fault is mine when I am degraded.  I trust you: there's the
+error.'
+
+The trial for Dacier was the sight of her quick-lifting; bosom under the
+mask of cold language: an attraction and repulsion in union; a delirium
+to any lover impelled to trample on weak defences.  But the evident pain
+he inflicted moved his pity, which helped to restore his conception of
+the beauty of her character.  She stood so nobly meek.  And she was never
+prudish, only self-respecting.  Although the great news he imparted had
+roused an ardent thirst for holiday and a dash out of harness, and he
+could hardly check it, he yielded her the lead.
+
+'Trust me you may,' he said.  'But you know--we are one.  The world has
+given you to me, me to you.  Why should we be asunder?  There's no reason
+in it.'
+
+She replied: 'But still I wish to burn a little incense in honour of
+myself, or else I cannot live.  It is the truth.  You make Death my truer
+friend, and at this moment I would willingly go out.  You would respect
+me more dead than alive.  I could better pardon you too.'
+
+He pleaded for the red mouth's pardon, remotely irritated by the
+suspicion that she swayed him overmuch: and he had deserved the small
+benevolences and donations of love, crumbs and heavenly dews!
+
+'Not a word of pardon,' said Diana.  'I shall never count an iota against
+you "in the dark backward and abysm of Time."  This news is great, and I
+have sunk beneath it.  Come tomorrow.  Then we will speak upon whatever
+you can prove rational.  The hour is getting late.'
+
+Dacier took a draught of her dark beauty with the crimson he had kindled
+over the cheeks.  Her lips were firmly closed, her eyes grave; dry, but
+seeming to waver tearfully in their heavy fulness.  He could not doubt
+her love of him; and although chafing at the idea that she swayed him
+absurdly--beyond the credible in his world of wag-tongues--he resumed his
+natural soberness, as a garment, not very uneasily fitting: whence it
+ensued--for so are we influenced by the garb we put on us--that his manly
+sentiment of revolt in being condemned to play second, was repressed by
+the refreshment breathed on him from her lofty character, the pure jewel
+proffered to his, inward ownership.
+
+'Adieu for the night,' he said, and she smiled.  He pressed for a
+pressure of her hand.  She brightened her smile instead, and said only:
+'Good night, Percy.'
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXII
+
+WHEREIN WE BEHOLD A GIDDY TURN AT THE SPECTRAL CROSSWAYS
+
+Danvers accompanied Mr. Dacier to the house-door.  Climbing the stairs,
+she found her mistress in the drawing-room still.
+
+'You must be cold, ma'am,' she said, glancing at the fire-grate.
+
+'Is it a frost?' said Diana.
+
+'It's midnight and midwinter, ma'am.'
+
+'Has it struck midnight?'
+
+The mantel-piece clock said five minutes past.
+
+'You had better go to bed, Danvers, or you will lose your bloom.  Stop;
+you are a faithful soul.  Great things are happening and I am agitated.
+Mr. Dacier has told me news.  He came back purposely.'
+
+'Yes, ma'am,' said Danvers.  'He had a great deal to tell?'
+
+'Well, he had.'  Diana coloured at the first tentative impertinence she
+had heard from her maid.  'What is the secret of you, Danvers?  What
+attaches you to me?'
+
+'I'm sure I don't know, ma'am.  I'm romantic.'
+
+'And you think me a romantic object?'
+
+'I'm sure I can't say, ma'am.  I'd rather serve you than any other lady;
+and I wish you was happy.'
+
+'Do you suppose I am unhappy?'
+
+'I'm sure--but if I may speak, ma'am: so handsome and clever a lady!
+and young!  I can't bear to see it.'
+
+'Tush, you silly woman.  You read your melting tales, and imagine.
+I must go and write for money: it is my profession.  And I haven't an
+idea in my head.  This news disturbs me.  Ruin if I don't write; so I
+must.--I can't!'
+
+Diana beheld the ruin.  She clasped the great news for succour.  Great
+indeed: and known but to her of all the outer world.  She was ahead of
+all--ahead of Mr. Tonans!
+
+The visionary figure of Mr. Tonans petrified by the great news, drinking
+it, and confessing her ahead of him in the race for secrets, arose
+toweringly.  She had not ever seen the Editor in his den at midnight.
+With the rumble of his machinery about him, and fresh matter arriving
+and flying into the printing-press, it must be like being in the very
+furnace-hissing of Events: an Olympian Council held in Vulcan's smithy.
+Consider the bringing to the Jove there news of such magnitude as to
+stupefy him!  He, too, who had admonished her rather sneeringly for
+staleness in her information.  But this news, great though it was,
+and throbbing like a heart plucked out of a breathing body, throbbed but
+for a brief term, a day or two; after which, great though it was,
+immense, it relapsed into a common organ, a possession of the multitude,
+merely historically curious.
+
+'You are not afraid of the streets at night?' Diana said to her maid, as
+they were going upstairs.
+
+'Not when we're driving, ma'am,' was the answer.
+
+THE MAN OF TWO MINDS faced his creatrix in the dressing-room, still
+delivering that most ponderous of sentences--a smothering pillow!
+
+I have mistaken my vocation, thought Diana: I am certainly the flattest
+proser who ever penned a line.
+
+She sent Dangers into the bedroom on a trifling errand, unable to bear
+the woman's proximity, and oddly unwilling to dismiss her.
+
+She pressed her hands on her eyelids.  Would Percy have humiliated her
+so if he had respected her?  He took advantage of the sudden loss of her
+habitual queenly initiative at the wonderful news to debase and stain
+their intimacy.  The lover's behaviour was judged by her sensations: she
+felt humiliated, plucked violently from the throne where she had long
+been sitting securely, very proudly.  That was at an end.  If she was to
+be better than the loathsomest of hypocrites, she must deny him his
+admission to the house.  And then what was her life!
+
+Something that was pressing her low, she knew not how, and left it
+unquestioned, incited her to exaggerate the indignity her pride had
+suffered.  She was a dethroned woman.  Deeper within, an unmasked
+actress, she said.  Oh, she forgave him!  But clearly he took her for
+the same as other women consenting to receive a privileged visitor.
+And sounding herself to the soul, was she so magnificently better?
+Her face flamed.  She hugged her arms at her breast to quiet the beating,
+and dropped them when she surprised herself embracing the memory.  He had
+brought political news, and treated her as--name the thing!  Not
+designedly, it might be: her position invited it.  'The world had given
+her to him.'  The world is always a prophet of the mire; but the world is
+no longer an utterly mistaken world.  She shook before it.
+
+She asked herself why Percy or the world should think highly of an
+adventuress, who was a denounced wife, a wretched author, and on the
+verge of bankruptcy.  She was an adventuress.  When she held The
+Crossways she had at least a bit of solid footing: now gone.  An
+adventuress without an idea in her head: witness her dullard,
+The Man of Two Minds, at his work of sermonizing his mistress.
+
+The tremendous pressure upon our consciousness of the material cause,
+when we find ourselves cast among the breakers of moral difficulties and
+endeavour to elude that mudvisaged monster, chiefly by feigning
+unconsciousness, was an experience of Diana's, in the crisis to which she
+was wrought.  Her wits were too acute, her nature too direct, to permit
+of a lengthened confusion.  She laid the scourge on her flesh smartly.
+--I gave him these privileges because I am weak as the weakest, base as
+my enemies proclaim me.  I covered my woman's vile weakness with an air
+of intellectual serenity that he, choosing his moment, tore away,
+exposing me to myself, as well as to him, the most ordinary of reptiles.
+I kept up a costly household for the sole purpose of seeing him and
+having him near me.  Hence this bitter need of money!--Either it must be
+money or disgrace.  Money would assist her quietly to amend and complete
+her work.  Yes, and this want of money, in a review of the last two
+years, was the material cause of her recklessness.  It was, her revived
+and uprising pudency declared, the principal; the only cause.  Mere want
+of money.
+
+And she had a secret worth thousands!  The secret of a day, no more:
+anybody's secret after some four and twenty hours.
+
+She smiled at the fancied elongation and stare of the features of Mr.
+Tonans in his editorial midnight den.
+
+What if he knew it and could cap it with something novel and stranger?
+Hardly.  But it was an inciting suggestion.
+
+She began to tremble as a lightning-flash made visible her fortunes
+recovered, disgrace averted, hours of peace for composition stretching
+before her: a summer afternoon's vista.
+
+It seemed a duel between herself and Mr. Tonans, and she sure of her
+triumph--Diana victrix!
+
+'Danvers!' she called.
+
+'Is it to undress, ma'am?' said the maid, entering to her.
+
+'You are not afraid of the streets, you tell me.  I have to go down to
+the City, I think.  It is urgent.  Yes, I must go.  If I were to impart
+the news to you, your head would be a tolling bell for a month.'
+
+'You will take a cab, ma'am.'
+
+'We must walk out to find one.  I must go, though I should have to go on
+foot.  Quick with bonnet and shawl; muffle up warmly.  We have never been
+out so late: but does it matter?  You're a brave soul, I'm sure, and you
+shall have your fee.'
+
+'I don't care for money, ma'am.'
+
+'When we get home you shall kiss me.'
+
+Danvers clothed her mistress in furs and rich wrappings: Not paid for!
+was Diana's desperate thought, and a wrong one; but she had to seem the
+precipitated bankrupt and succeeded.  She was near being it.  The boiling
+of her secret carried her through the streets rapidly and unobservantly
+except of such small things as the glow of the lights on the pavements
+and the hushed cognizance of the houses, in silence to a thoroughfare
+where a willing cabman was met.  The destination named, he nodded alertly
+he had driven gentlemen there at night from the House of Commons, he
+said.
+
+'Our Parliament is now sitting, and you drive ladies,' Diana replied.
+
+'I hope I know one, never mind the hour,' said he of the capes.
+
+He was bidden to drive rapidly.
+
+'Complexion a tulip: you do not often see a pale cabman,' she remarked to
+Danvers, who began laughing, as she always expected to do on an excursion
+with her mistress.
+
+'Do you remember, ma'am, the cabman taking us to the coach, when you
+thought of going to the continent?'
+
+'And I went to The Crossways?  I have forgotten him.'
+
+'He declared you was so beautiful a lady he would drive you to the end of
+England for nothing.'
+
+'It must have been when I was paying him.  Put it out of your mind,
+Danvers, that there are individual cabmen.  They are the painted flowers
+of our metropolitan thoroughfares, and we gather them in rows.'
+
+'They have their feelings, ma'am.'
+
+'Brandied feelings are not pathetic to me.'
+
+'I like to think kindly of them,' Danvers remarked, in reproof of her
+inhumanity; adding: 'They may overturn us!' at which Diana laughed.
+Her eyes were drawn to a brawl of women and men in the street.  'Ah!
+that miserable sight!' she cried.  'It is the everlasting nightmare of
+London.'
+
+Danvers humped, femininely injured by the notice of it.  She wondered her
+mistress should deign to.
+
+Rolling on between the blind and darkened houses, Diana transferred her
+sensations to them, and in a fit of the nerves imagined them beholding a
+funeral convoy without followers.
+
+They came in view of the domed cathedral, hearing, in a pause of the
+wheels, the bell of the hour.  'Faster--faster!  my dear man,' Diana
+murmured, and they entered a small still square of many lighted windows.
+
+'This must be where the morrow is manufactured,' she said.  'Tell the man
+to wait.--Or rather it's the mirror of yesterday: we have to look
+backward to see forward in life.'
+
+She talked her cool philosophy to mask her excitement from herself.
+Her card, marked: 'Imperative-two minutes,' was taken up to Mr. Tonans.
+They ascended to the editorial ante-room.  Doors opened and shut, hasty
+feet traversed the corridors, a dull hum in dumbness told of mighty
+business at work.  Diana received the summons to the mighty head of the
+establishment.  Danvers was left to speculate.  She heard the voice of
+Mr. Tonans: 'Not more than two!'  This was not a place for compliments.
+Men passed her, hither and yonder, cursorily noticing the presence of a
+woman.  She lost, very strangely to her, the sense of her sex and became
+an object--a disregarded object.  Things of more importance were about.
+Her feminine self-esteem was troubled; all idea of attractiveness
+expired.  Here was manifestly a spot where women had dropped from the
+secondary to the cancelled stage of their extraordinary career in a world
+either blowing them aloft like soap-bubbles or quietly shelving them as
+supernumeraries.  A gentleman--sweet vision!--shot by to the editor's
+door, without even looking cursorily.  He knocked.  Mr. Tonans appeared
+and took him by the arm, dictating at a great rate; perceived Danvers,
+frowned at the female, and requested him to wait in the room, which the
+gentleman did, not once casting eye upon a woman.  At last her mistress
+returned to her, escorted so far by Mr. Tonans, and he refreshingly bent
+his back to bow over her hand: so we have the satisfaction of knowing
+that we are not such poor creatures after all!  Suffering in person,
+Danvers was revived by the little show of homage to her sex.
+
+They descended the stairs.
+
+'You are not an Editor of a paper, but you may boast that you have been
+near the nest of one,' Diana said, when they resumed their seats in the
+cab.  She breathed deeply from time to time, as if under a weight, or
+relieved of it, but she seemed animated, and she dropped now and again a
+funny observation of the kind that tickled Danvers and caused the maid to
+boast of her everywhere as better than a Play.
+
+At home, Danvers busied her hands to supply her mistress a cup of
+refreshing tea and a plate of biscuits.
+
+Diana had stunned herself with the strange weight of the expedition, and
+had not a thought.  In spite of tea at that hour, she slept soundly
+through the remainder of the night, dreamlessly till late into the
+morning.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIII
+
+EXHIBITS THE SPRINGING OF A MINE IN A NEWSPAPER ARTICLE
+
+The powers of harmony would seem to be tried to their shrewdest pitch
+when Politics and Love are planted together in a human breast.  This
+apparently opposite couple can nevertheless chant a very sweet accord,
+as was shown by Dacier on his homeward walk from Diana's house.  Let Love
+lead, the God will make music of any chamber-comrade.  He was able to
+think of affairs of State while feeling the satisfied thirst of the lover
+whose pride, irritated by confidential wild eulogies of the beautiful
+woman, had recently clamoured for proofs of his commandership.  The
+impression she stamped on him at Copsley remained, but it could not
+occupy the foreground for ever.  He did not object to play second to her
+sprightly wits in converse, if he had some warm testimony to his mastery
+over her blood.  For the world had given her to him, enthusiastic friends
+had congratulated him: she had exalted him for true knightliness; and he
+considered the proofs well earned, though he did not value them low.
+They were little by comparison.  They lighted, instead of staining, her
+unparalleled high character.
+
+She loved him.  Full surely did she love him, or such a woman would never
+have consented to brave the world; once in their project of flight, and
+next, even more endearingly when contemplated, in the sacrifice of her
+good name; not omitting that fervent memory of her pained submission,
+but a palpitating submission, to his caress.  She was in his arms again
+at the thought of it.  He had melted her, and won the confession of her
+senses by a surprise, and he owned that never had woman been so
+vigilantly self-guarded or so watchful to keep her lover amused and
+aloof.  Such a woman deserved long service.  But then the long service
+deserved its time of harvest.  Her surging look of reproach in submission
+pointed to the golden time, and as he was a man of honour, pledged to her
+for life, he had no remorse, and no scruple in determining to exact her
+dated promise, on this occasion deliberately.  She was the woman to be
+his wife; she was his mind's mate: they had hung apart in deference to
+mere scruples too long.  During the fierce battle of the Session she
+would be his help, his fountain of counsel; and she would be the rosy
+gauze-veiled more than cold helper and adviser, the being which would
+spur her womanly intelligence to acknowledge, on this occasion
+deliberately, the wisdom of the step.  They had been so close to it!
+She might call it madness then: now it was wisdom.  Each had complete
+experience of the other, and each vowed the step must be taken.
+As to the secret communicated, he exulted in the pardonable cunning of
+the impulse turning him back to her house after the guests had gone, and
+the dexterous play of his bait on the line, tempting her to guess and
+quit her queenly guard.  Though it had not been distinctly schemed, the
+review of it in that light added to the enjoyment.  It had been dimly and
+richly conjectured as a hoped result.  Small favours from her were really
+worth, thrice worth, the utmost from other women.  They tasted the
+sweeter for the winning of them artfully--an honourable thing in love.
+Nature, rewarding the lover's ingenuity and enterprise, inspires him
+with old Greek notions of right and wrong: and love is indeed a fluid
+mercurial realm, continually shifting the principles of rectitude and
+larceny.  As long as he means nobly, what is there to condemn him?  Not
+she in her heart.  She was the presiding divinity.
+
+And she, his Tony, that splendid Diana, was the woman the world abused!
+Whom will it not abuse?
+
+The slough she would have to plunge in before he could make her his own
+with the world's consent, was already up to her throat.  She must, and
+without further hesitation, be steeped, that he might drag her out,
+washed of the imputed defilement, and radiant, as she was in character.
+Reflection now said this; not impulse.  Her words rang through him.
+At every meeting she said things to confound his estimate of the wits of
+women, or be remembered for some spirited ring they had: A high wind will
+make a dead leaf fly like a bird.  He murmured it and flew with her.
+She quickened a vein of imagination that gave him entrance to a strangely
+brilliant sphere, above his own, where, she sustaining, he too could
+soar; and he did, scarce conscious of walking home, undressing, falling
+asleep.
+
+The act of waking was an instantaneous recovery of his emotional rapture
+of the overnight; nor was it a bar to graver considerations.  His Chief
+had gone down to a house in the country; his personal business was to see
+and sound the followers of their party--after another sight of his Tony.
+She would be sure to counsel sagaciously; she always did.  She had a
+marvellous intuition of the natures of the men he worked with, solely
+from his chance descriptions of them; it was as though he started the
+bird and she transfixed it.  And she should not have matter to rule her
+smooth brows: that he swore to.  She should sway him as she pleased, be
+respected after her prescribed manner.  The promise must be exacted;
+nothing besides, promise.--You see, Tony, you cannot be less than Tony to
+me now, he addressed the gentle phantom of her.  Let me have your word,
+and I am your servant till the Session ends.--Tony blushes her swarthy
+crimson: Diana, fluttering, rebukes her; but Diana is the appeasable
+Goddess; Tony is the woman, and she loves him.  The glorious Goddess need
+not cut them adrift; they can show her a book of honest pages.
+
+Dacier could truthfully say he had worshipped, done knightly service to
+the beloved woman, homage to the aureole encircling her.  Those friends
+of his, covertly congratulating him on her preference, doubtless thought
+him more privileged than he was; but they did not know Diana; and they
+were welcome, if they would only believe, to the knowledge that he was
+at the feet of this most sovereign woman.  He despised the particular
+Satyr-world which, whatever the nature or station of the woman, crowns
+the desecrator, and bestows the title of Fool on the worshipper.  He
+could have answered veraciously that she had kept him from folly.
+
+Nevertheless the term to service must come.  In the assurance of the
+approaching term he stood braced against a blowing world; happy as men
+are when their muscles are strung for a prize they pluck with the energy
+and aim of their whole force.
+
+Letters and morning papers were laid for him to peruse in his dressing-
+room.  He read his letters before the bath.  Not much public news was
+expected at the present season.  While dressing, he turned over the
+sheets of Whitmonby's journal.  Dull comments on stale things.  Foreign
+news.  Home news, with the leaders on them, identically dull.  Behold the
+effect of Journalism: a witty man, sparkling overnight, gets into his
+pulpit and proses; because he must say something, and he really knows
+nothing.
+
+Journalists have an excessive overestimate of their influence.  They
+cannot, as Diana said, comparing them with men on the Parliamentary
+platform, cannot feel they are aboard the big vessel; they can only
+strive to raise a breeze, or find one to swell; and they cannot measure
+the stoutness or the greatness of the good ship England.  Dacier's
+personal ambition was inferior to his desire to extend and strengthen his
+England.  Parliament was the field, Government the office.  How many
+conversations had passed between him and Diana on that patriotic dream!
+She had often filled his drooping sails; he owned it proudly:--and while
+the world, both the hoofed and the rectilinear portions, were biting at
+her character!  Had he fretted her self-respect?  He blamed himself, but
+a devoted service must have its term.
+
+The paper of Mr. Tonans was reserved for perusal at breakfast.  He
+reserved it because Tonans was an opponent, tricksy and surprising now
+and then, amusing too; unlikely to afford him serious reflections.  The
+recent endeavours of his journal to whip the Government-team to a right-
+about-face were annoying, preposterous.  Dacier had admitted to Diana
+that Tonans merited the thanks of the country during 'the discreditable
+Railway mania, when his articles had a fine exhortative and prophetic
+twang, and had done marked good.  Otherwise, as regarded the Ministry,
+the veering gusts of Tonans were objectionable: he 'raised the breeze'
+wantonly as well as disagreeably.  Any one can whip up the populace if he
+has the instruments; and Tonans frequently intruded on the Ministry's
+prerogative to govern.  The journalist was bidding against the statesman.
+But such is the condition of a rapidly Radicalizing country!  We must
+take it as it is.
+
+With a complacent, What now, Dacier fixed his indifferent eyes on the
+first column of the leaders.  He read, and his eyes grew horny.  He
+jerked back at each sentence, electrified, staring.  The article was
+shorter than usual.  Total Repeal was named; the precise date when the
+Minister intended calling Parliament together to propose it.  The 'Total
+Repeal' might be guess-work--an Editor's bold stroke; but the details,
+the date, were significant of positive information.  The Minister's
+definite and immediate instructions were exactly stated.
+
+Where could the fellow have got hold of that?  Dacier asked the blank
+ceiling.
+
+He frowned at vacant corners of the room in an effort to conjure some
+speculation indicative of the source.
+
+Had his Chief confided the secret to another and a traitor?  Had they
+been overheard in his library when the project determined on was put in
+plain speech?
+
+The answer was no, impossible, to each question.
+
+He glanced at Diana.  She?  But it was past midnight when he left her.
+And she would never have betrayed him, never, never.  To imagine it a
+moment was an injury to her.
+
+Where else could he look?  It had been specially mentioned in the
+communication as a secret by his Chief, who trusted him and no others.
+Up to the consultation with the Cabinet, it was a thing to be guarded
+like life itself.  Not to a soul except Diana would Dacier have breathed
+syllable of any secret--and one of this weight!
+
+He ran down the article again.  There were the facts; undeniable facts;
+and they detonated with audible roaring and rounding echoes of them over
+England.  How did they come there?  As well inquire how man came on the,
+face of the earth.
+
+He had to wipe his forehead perpetually.  Think as he would in exaltation
+of Diana to shelter himself, he was the accused.  He might not be the
+guilty, but he had opened his mouth; and though it was to her only, and
+she, as Dunstane had sworn, true as steel, he could not escape
+condemnation.  He had virtually betrayed his master.  Diana would never
+betray her lover, but the thing was in the air as soon as uttered: and
+off to the printing-press!  Dacier's grotesque fancy under annoyance
+pictured a stream of small printer's devils in flight from his babbling
+lips.
+
+He consumed bits of breakfast, with a sour confession that a newspaper-
+article had hit him at last, and stunningly.
+
+Hat and coat were called for.  The state of aimlessness in hot perplexity
+demands a show of action.  Whither to go first was as obscure as what to
+do.  Diana said of the Englishman's hat and coat, that she supposed they
+were to make him a walking presentment of the house he had shut up behind
+him.  A shot of the eye at the glass confirmed the likeness, but with a
+ruefully wry-faced repudiation of it internally:--Not so shut up! the
+reverse of that-a common babbler.
+
+However, there was no doubt of Diana.  First he would call on her.  The
+pleasantest dose in perturbations of the kind is instinctively taken
+first.  She would console, perhaps direct him to guess how the secret had
+leaked.  But so suddenly, immediately!  It was inexplicable.
+
+Sudden and immediate consequences were experienced.  On the steps of his
+house his way was blocked by the arrival of Mr. Quintin Manx, who jumped
+out of a cab, bellowing interjections and interrogations in a breath.
+Was there anything in that article?  He had read it at breakfast, and it
+had choked him.  Dacier was due at a house and could not wait: he said,
+rather sharply, he was not responsible for newspaper articles.  Quintin
+Manx, a senior gentleman and junior landowner, vowed that no Minister
+intending to sell the country should treat him as a sheep.  The shepherd
+might go; he would not carry his flock with him.  But was there a twinkle
+of probability in the story?  .  .  .  that article!  Dacier was unable
+to inform him; he was very hurried, had to keep an appointment.
+
+'If I let you go, will you come and lunch with me at two?' said Quintin.
+
+To get rid of him, Dacier nodded and agreed.
+
+'Two o'clock, mind!' was bawled at his heels as he walked off with his
+long stride, unceremoniously leaving the pursy gentleman of sixty to
+settle with his cabman far to the rear.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIV
+
+IN WHICH IT IS DARKLY SEEN HOW THE CRIMINAL'S JUDGE MAY BE LOVE'S
+CRIMINAL
+
+When we are losing balance on a precipice we do not think much of the
+thing we have clutched for support.  Our balance is restored and we have
+not fallen; that is the comfortable reflection: we stand as others do,
+and we will for the future be warned to avoid the dizzy stations which
+cry for resources beyond a common equilibrium, and where a slip
+precipitates us to ruin.
+
+When, further, it is a woman planted in a burning blush, having to
+idealize her feminine weakness, that she may not rebuke herself for
+grovelling, the mean material acts by which she sustains a tottering
+position are speedily swallowed in the one pervading flame.  She sees
+but an ashen curl of the path she has traversed to safety, if anything.
+
+Knowing her lover was to come in the morning, Diana's thoughts dwelt
+wholly upon the way to tell him, as tenderly as possible without danger
+to herself, that her time for entertaining was over until she had
+finished her book; indefinitely, therefore.  The apprehension of his
+complaining pricked the memory that she had something to forgive.  He had
+sunk her in her own esteem by compelling her to see her woman's softness.
+But how high above all other men her experience of him could place him
+notwithstanding!  He had bowed to the figure of herself, dearer than
+herself, that she set before him: and it was a true figure to the world;
+a too fictitious to any but the most knightly of lovers.  She forgave;
+and a shudder seized her.--Snake!  she rebuked the delicious run of fire
+through her veins; for she vas not like the idol women of imperishable
+type, who are never for a twinkle the prey of the blood: statues created
+by man's common desire to impress upon the sex his possessing pattern of
+them as domestic decorations.
+
+When she entered the room to Dacier and they touched hands, she rejoiced
+in her coolness, without any other feeling or perception active.  Not to
+be unkind, not too kind: this was her task.  She waited for the passage
+of commonplaces.
+
+'You slept well, Percy?'
+
+'Yes; and you?'
+
+'I don't think I even dreamed.'
+
+They sat.  She noticed the cloud on him and waited for his allusion to
+it, anxious concerning him simply.
+
+Dacier flung the hair off his temples.  Words of Titanic formation were
+hurling in his head at journals and journalists.  He muttered his disgust
+of them.
+
+'Is there anything to annoy you in the papers to-day?' she asked, and
+thought how handsome his face was in anger.
+
+The paper of Mr. Tonans was named by him.  'You have not seen it?
+
+'I have not opened it yet.'
+
+He sprang up.  'The truth is, those fellows can now afford to buy right
+and left, corrupt every soul alive!  There must have been a spy at the
+keyhole.  I'm pretty certain--I could swear it was not breathed to any
+ear but mine; and there it is this morning in black and white.'
+
+'What is?' cried Diana, turning to him on her chair.
+
+'The thing I told you last night.'
+
+Her lips worked, as if to spell the thing.  'Printed, do you say?' she
+rose.
+
+'Printed.  In a leading article, loud as a trumpet; a hue and cry running
+from end to end of the country.  And my Chief has already had the
+satisfaction of seeing the secret he confided to me yesterday roared in
+all the thoroughfares this morning.  They've got the facts: his decision
+to propose it, and the date--the whole of it!  But who could have
+betrayed it?'
+
+For the first time since her midnight expedition she felt a sensation of
+the full weight of the deed.  She heard thunder.
+
+She tried to disperse the growing burden by an inward summons to contempt
+of the journalistic profession, but nothing would come.  She tried to
+minimize it, and her brain succumbed.  Her views of the deed last night
+and now throttled reason in two contending clutches.  The enormity
+swelled its dimensions, taking shape, and pointing magnetically at her.
+She stood absolutely, amazedly, bare before it.
+
+'Is it of such very great importance?' she said, like one supplicating
+him to lessen it.
+
+'A secret of State?  If you ask whether it is of great importance to me,
+relatively it is of course.  Nothing greater.  Personally my conscience
+is clear.  I never mentioned it--couldn't have mentioned it--to any one
+but you.  I'm not the man to blab secrets.  He spoke to me because he
+knew he could trust me.  To tell you the truth, I'm brought to a dead
+stop.  I can't make a guess.
+
+I'm certain, from what he said, that he trusted me only with it:
+perfectly certain.  I know him well.  He was in his library, speaking in
+his usual conversational tone, deliberately, nor overloud.  He stated
+that it was a secret between us.'
+
+'Will it affect him?'
+
+'This article?  Why, naturally it will.  You ask strange questions.  A
+Minister coming to a determination like that!  It affects him vitally.
+The members of the Cabinet are not so devoted .  .  .  .  It affects us
+all--the whole Party; may split it to pieces!  There's no reckoning the
+upset right and left.  If it were false, it could be refuted; we could
+despise it as a trick of journalism.  It's true.  There's the mischief.
+Tonans did not happen to call here last night?--absurd!  I left later
+than twelve.'
+
+'No, but let me hear,' Diana said hurriedly, for the sake of uttering the
+veracious negative and to slur it over.  'Let me hear .  .  .'  She could
+not muster an idea.
+
+Her delicious thrilling voice was a comfort to him.  He lifted his breast
+high and thumped it, trying to smile.  'After all, it's pleasant being
+with you, Tony.  Give me your hand--you may: I 'm bothered--confounded by
+this morning surprise.  It was like walking against the muzzle of a
+loaded cannon suddenly unmasked.  One can't fathom the mischief it will
+do.  And I shall be suspected, and can't quite protest myself the
+spotless innocent.  Not even to my heart's mistress!  to the wife of the
+bosom!  I suppose I'm no Roman.  You won't give me your hand?  Tony, you
+might, seeing I am rather .  .  .'
+
+A rush of scalding tears flooded her eyes.
+
+'Don't touch me,' she said, and forced her sight to look straight at him
+through the fiery shower.  'I have done positive mischief?'
+
+'You, my dear Tony?' He doated on her face.  'I don't blame you, I blame
+myself.  These things should never be breathed.  Once in the air, the
+devil has hold of them.  Don't take it so much to heart.  The thing's bad
+enough to bear as it is.  Tears!  Let me have the hand.  I came, on my
+honour, with the most honest intention to submit to your orders: but if I
+see you weeping in sympathy!'
+
+'Oh!  for heaven's sake,' she caught her hands away from him, 'don't be
+generous.  Whip me with scorpions.  And don't touch me,' cried Diana.
+'Do you understand?  You did not name it as a secret.  I did not imagine
+it to be a secret of immense, immediate importance.'
+
+'But--what?' shouted Dacier, stiffening.
+
+He wanted her positive meaning, as she perceived, having hoped that it
+was generally taken and current, and the shock to him over.
+
+'I had .  .  .  I had not a suspicion of doing harm, Percy.'
+
+'But what harm have you done?  No riddles!'
+
+His features gave sign of the break in their common ground, the widening
+gulf.
+
+'I went .  .  .  it was a curious giddiness: I can't account for it.  I
+thought .  .  .'
+
+'Went?  You went where?'
+
+'Last night.  I would speak intelligibly: my mind has gone.  Ah! you
+look.  It is not so bad as my feeling.'
+
+'But where did you go last night?  What!--to Tonans?'
+
+She drooped her head: she saw the track of her route cleaving the
+darkness in a demoniacal zig-zag and herself in demon's grip.
+
+'Yes,' she confronted him.  'I went to Mr. Tonans.'
+
+'Why?'
+
+'I went to him--'
+
+'You went alone?'
+
+'I took my maid.'
+
+'Well?'
+
+'It was late when you left me .  .  .'
+
+'Speak plainly!'
+
+'I am trying: I will tell you all.'
+
+'At once, if you please.'
+
+'I went to him--why?  There is no accounting for it.  He sneered
+constantly at my stale information.'
+
+'You gave him constant information?'
+
+'No: in our ordinary talk.  He railed at me for being "out of it."  I
+must be childish: I went to show him--oh! my vanity!  I think I must have
+been possessed.'
+
+She watched the hardening of her lover's eyes.  They penetrated, and
+through them she read herself insufferably.
+
+But it was with hesitation still that he said: 'Then you betrayed me?'
+
+'Percy!  I had not a suspicion of mischief.'
+
+'You went straight to this man?'
+
+'Not thinking .  .  .'
+
+'You sold me to a journalist!'
+
+'I thought it was a secret of a day.  I don't think you--no, you did not
+tell me to keep it secret.  A word from you would have been enough.  I
+was in extremity.'
+
+Dacier threw his hands up and broke away.  He had an impulse to dash from
+the room, to get a breath of different air.  He stood at the window,
+observing tradesmen's carts, housemaids, blank doors, dogs, a beggar
+fifer.  Her last words recurred to him.  He turned: 'You were in
+extremity, you said.  What is the meaning of that?  What extremity?'
+
+Her large dark eyes flashed powerlessly; her shape appeared to have
+narrowed; her tongue, too, was a feeble penitent.
+
+'You ask a creature to recall her acts of insanity.'
+
+'There must be some signification in your words, I suppose.'
+
+'I will tell you as clearly as I can.  You have the right to be my judge.
+I was in extremity--that is, I saw no means .  .  .  I could not write:
+it was ruin coming.'
+
+'Ah?--you took payment for playing spy?'
+
+'I fancied I could retrieve .  .  .  Now I see the folly, the baseness.
+I was blind.'
+
+'Then you sold me to a journalist for money?'
+
+The intolerable scourge fetched a stifled scream from her and drove her
+pacing, but there was no escape; she returned to meet it.
+
+The room was a cage to both of them, and every word of either was a
+sting.
+
+'Percy, I did not imagine he would use it--make use of it as he has
+done.'
+
+'Not?  And when he paid for it?'
+
+'I fancied it would be merely of general service--if any.'
+
+'Distributed; I see: not leading to the exposure of the communicant!'
+
+'You are harsh; but I would not have you milder.'
+
+The meekness of such a mischief-doer was revolting and called for the
+lash.
+
+'Do me the favour to name the sum.  I am curious to learn what my
+imbecility was counted worth.'
+
+'No sum was named.'
+
+'Have I been bought for a song?'
+
+'It was a suggestion--no definite . . .  nothing stipulated.'
+
+'You were to receive money!'
+
+'Leave me a bit of veiling!  No, you shall behold me the thing I am.
+Listen .  .  .  I was poor .  .  .'
+
+'You might have applied to me.'
+
+'For money!  That I could not do:
+
+'Better than betraying me, believe me.'
+
+'I had no thought of betraying.  I hope I could have died rather than
+consciously betray.'
+
+'Money!  My whole fortune was at your, disposal.'
+
+'I was beset with debts, unable to write, and, last night when you left
+me, abject.  It seemed to me that you disrespected me .  .  .'
+
+'Last night!'  Dacier cried with lashing emphasis.
+
+'It is evident to me that I have the reptile in me, Percy.  Or else I am
+subject to lose my reason.  I went .  .  .  I went like a bullet: I
+cannot describe it; I was mad.  I need a strong arm, I want help.  I am
+given to think that I do my best and can be independent; I break down.
+I went blindly--now I see it--for the chance of recovering my position,
+as the gambler casts; and he wins or loses.  With me it is the soul that
+is lost.  No exact sum was named; thousands were hinted.'
+
+'You are hardly practical on points of business.'
+
+'I was insane.'
+
+'I think you said you slept well after it,' Dacier remarked.
+
+'I had so little the idea of having done evilly, that I slept without a
+dream.'
+
+He shrugged:--the consciences of women are such smooth deeps, or running
+shallows.
+
+'I have often wondered how your newspaper men got their information,' he
+said, and muttered: 'Money-women!' adding: 'Idiots to prime them!  And I
+one of the leaky vessels!  Well, we learn.  I have been rather astonished
+at times of late at the scraps of secret knowledge displayed by Tonans.
+If he flourishes his thousands!  The wonder is, he doesn't corrupt the
+Ministers' wives.  Perhaps he does.  Marriage will become a danger-sign
+to Parliamentary members.  Foreign women do these tricks .  .  .  women
+of a well-known stamp.  It is now a full year, I think, since I began to
+speak to you of secret matters--and congratulated myself, I recollect,
+on your thirst for them.'
+
+'Percy, if you suspect that I have uttered one word before last night,
+you are wrong.  I cannot paint my temptation or my loss of sense last
+night.  Previously I was blameless.  I thirsted, yes; but in the hope of
+helping you.'
+
+He looked at her.  She perceived how glitteringly loveless his eyes had
+grown.  It was her punishment; and though the enamoured woman's heart
+protested it excessive, she accepted it.
+
+'I can never trust you again,' he said.
+
+'I fear you will not,' she replied.
+
+His coming back to her after the departure of the guests last night shone
+on him in splendid colours of single-minded loverlike devotion.  'I came
+to speak to my own heart.  I thought it would give you pleasure; thought
+I could trust you utterly.  I had not the slightest conception I was
+imperilling my honour .  .  .  !'
+
+He stopped.  Her bloodless fixed features revealed an intensity of
+anguish that checked him.  Only her mouth, a little open for the sharp
+breath, appeared dumbly beseeching.  Her large eyes met his like steel to
+steel, as of one who would die fronting the weapon.
+
+He strangled a loathsome inclination to admire.
+
+'So good bye,' he said.
+
+She moved her lips.
+
+He said no more.  In half a minute he was gone.
+
+To her it was the plucking of life out of her breast.
+
+She pressed her hands where heart had been.  The pallor and cold of death
+took her body.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXV
+
+REVEALS HOW THE TRUE HEROINE OF ROMANCE COMES FINALLY TO HER, TIME OF
+TRIUMPH
+
+The shutting of her house-door closed for Dacier that woman's history in
+connection with himself.  He set his mind on the consequences of the act
+of folly--the trusting a secret to a woman.  All were possibly not so
+bad: none should be trusted.
+
+The air of the street fanned him agreeably as he revolved the horrible
+project of confession to the man who had put faith in him.  Particulars
+might be asked.  She would be unnamed, but an imagination of the effect
+of naming her placarded a notorious woman in fresh paint: two members of
+the same family her victims!
+
+And last night, no later than last night, he had swung round at this very
+corner of the street to give her the fullest proof of his affection.  He
+beheld a dupe trotting into a carefully-laid pitfall.  She had him by the
+generosity of his confidence in her.  Moreover, the recollection of her
+recent feeble phrasing, when she stood convicted of the treachery, when a
+really clever woman would have developed her resources, led him to doubt
+her being so finely gifted.  She was just clever enough to hoodwink.  He
+attributed the dupery to a trick of imposing the idea of her virtue upon
+men.  Attracted by her good looks and sparkle, they entered the circle of
+her charm, became delightfully intimate, suffered a rebuff, and were from
+that time prepared to serve her purpose.  How many other wretched dupes
+had she dangling?  He spied at Westlake, spied at Redworth, at old Lord
+Larrian, at Lord Dannisburgh, at Arthur Rhodes, dozens.  Old and young
+were alike to her if she saw an end to be gained by keeping them hooked.
+Tonans too, and Whitmonby.  Newspaper editors were especially
+serviceable.  Perhaps 'a young Minister of State' held the foremost rank
+in that respect: if completely duped and squeezeable, he produced more
+substantial stuff.
+
+The background of ice in Dacier's composition was brought to the front by
+his righteous contempt of her treachery.  No explanation of it would have
+appeased him.  She was guilty, and he condemned her.  She stood condemned
+by all the evil likely to ensue from her misdeed.  Scarcely had he left
+her house last night when she was away to betray him!--He shook her from
+him without a pang.  Crediting her with the one merit she had--that of
+not imploring for mercy--he the more easily shook her off.  Treacherous,
+she had not proved theatrical.  So there was no fuss in putting out her
+light, and it was done.  He was justified by the brute facts.
+Honourable, courteous, kindly gentleman, highly civilized, an excellent
+citizen and a patriot, he was icy at an outrage to his principles, and in
+the dominion of Love a sultan of the bow-string and chopper period,
+sovereignly endowed to stretch a finger for the scimitared Mesrour to
+make the erring woman head and trunk with one blow: and away with those
+remnants!  This internally he did.  Enough that the brute facts justified
+him.
+
+St. James's park was crossed, and the grass of the Green park, to avoid
+inquisitive friends.  He was obliged to walk; exercise, action of any
+sort, was imperative, and but for some engagement he would have gone to
+his fencing-rooms for a bout with the master.  He remembered his
+engagement and grew doubly embittered.  He had absurdly pledged himself
+to lunch with Quintin Manx; that was, to pretend to eat while submitting
+to be questioned by a political dullard strong on his present right to
+overhaul and rail at his superiors.  The house was one of a block along
+the North-Western line of Hyde park.  He kicked at the subjection to go
+there, but a promise was binding, though he gave it when stunned.  He
+could have silenced Mr. Manx with the posing interrogation: Why have I so
+long consented to put myself at the mercy of a bore?  For him, he could
+not answer it, though Manx, as leader of the Shipping interest, was
+influential.  The man had to be endured, like other doses in politics.
+
+Dacier did not once think of the great ship-owner's niece till Miss
+Constance Asper stepped into her drawing-room to welcome him.  She was an
+image of repose to his mind.  The calm pure outline of her white features
+refreshed him as the Alps the Londoner newly alighted at Berne; smoke,
+wrangle, the wrestling city's wickedness, behind him.
+
+'My uncle is very disturbed,' she said.  'Is the news--if I am not very
+indiscreet in inquiring?'
+
+'I have a practice of never paying attention to newspaper articles,'
+Dacier replied.
+
+'I am only affected by living with one who does,' Miss Asper observed,
+and the lofty isolation of her head above politics gave her a moral
+attractiveness in addition to physical beauty.  Her water-colour sketches
+were on her uncle's walls: the beautiful in nature claimed and absorbed
+her.  She dressed with a pretty rigour, a lovely simplicity, picturesque
+of the nunnery.  She looked indeed a high-born young lady-abbess.
+
+'It's a dusty game for ladies,' Dacier said, abhorring the women defiled
+by it.
+
+And when one thinks of the desire of men to worship women, there is a
+pathos in a man's discovery of the fair young creature undefiled by any
+interest in public affairs, virginal amid her bower's environments.
+
+The angelical beauty of a virgin mind and person captivated him, by
+contrast.  His natural taste was to admire it, shunning the lures and
+tangles of the women on high seas, notably the married: who, by the way,
+contrive to ensnare us through wonderment at a cleverness caught from
+their traffic with the masculine world: often--if we did but know!--
+a parrot-repetition of the last male visitor's remarks.  But that which
+the fair maiden speaks, though it may be simple, is her own.
+
+She too is her own: or vowed but to one.  She is on all sides impressive
+in purity.  The world worships her as its perfect pearl: and we are
+brought refreshfully to acknowledge that the world is right.
+
+By contrast, the white radiation of Innocence distinguished Constance
+Asper celestially.  As he was well aware, she had long preferred him--
+the reserved among many pleading pressing suitors.  Her steady
+faithfulness had fed on the poorest crumbs.
+
+He ventured to express the hope that she was well.
+
+'Yes,' she answered, with eyelids lifted softly to thank him for his
+concern in so humble a person.
+
+'You look a little pale,' he said.
+
+She coloured like a sea-water shell.  'I am inclined to paleness by
+nature.'
+
+Her uncle disturbed them.  Lunch was ready.  He apologized for the
+absence of Mrs. Markland, a maternal aunt of Constance, who kept house
+for them.  Quintin Manx fell upon the meats, and then upon the Minister.
+Dacier found himself happily surprised by the accession of an appetite.
+He mentioned it, to escape from the worrying of his host, as unusual with
+him at midday: and Miss Asper, supporting him in that effort, said
+benevolently: 'Gentlemen should eat; they have so many fatigues and
+troubles.'  She herself did not like to be seen eating in public.  Her
+lips opened to the morsels, as with a bird's bill, though with none of
+the pecking eagerness we complacently observe in poultry.
+
+'But now, I say, positively, how about that article?' said Quintin.
+
+Dacier visibly winced, and Constance immediately said 'Oh!  spare us
+politics, dear uncle.'
+
+Her intercession was without avail, but by contrast with the woman
+implicated in the horrible article, it was a carol of the seraphs.
+
+'Come, you can say whether there's anything in it,' Dacier's host pushed
+him.
+
+'I should not say it if I could,' he replied.
+
+The mild sweetness of Miss Asper's look encouraged him.
+
+He was touched to the quick by hearing her say: 'You ask for Cabinet
+secrets, uncle.  All secrets are holy, but secrets of State are under a
+seal next to divine.'
+
+Next to divine!  She was the mouthpiece of his ruling principle.
+
+'I 'm not, prying into secrets,' Quintin persisted; 'all I want to know
+is, whether there 's any foundation for that article--all London's
+boiling about it, I can tell you--or it's only newspaper's humbug.'
+
+'Clearly the oracle for you is the Editor's office,' rejoined Dacier.
+
+'A pretty sort of answer I should get.'
+
+'It would at least be complimentary.'
+
+'How do you mean?'
+
+'The net was cast for you--and the sight of a fish in it!'
+
+Miss Asper almost laughed.  'Have you heard the choir at St.
+Catherine's?' she asked.
+
+Dacier had not.  He repented of his worldliness, and drinking persuasive
+claret, said he would go to hear it next Sunday.
+
+'Do,' she murmured.
+
+'Well, you seem to be a pair against me,' her uncle grumbled.  'Anyhow I
+think it's important.  People have been talking for some time, and I
+don't want to be taken unawares; I won't be a yoked ox, mind you.'
+
+'Have you been sketching lately?' Dacier asked Miss Asper.
+
+She generally filled a book in the autumn, she said.
+
+'May I see it?'
+
+'If you wish.'
+
+They had a short tussle with her uncle and escaped.  He was conducted to
+a room midway upstairs: an heiress's conception of a saintly little room;
+and more impresive in purity, indeed it was, than a saint's, with the
+many crucifixes, gold and silver emblems, velvet prie-Dieu chairs, jewel-
+clasped sacred volumes: every invitation to meditate in luxury on an
+ascetic religiousness.
+
+She depreciated her sketching powers.  'I am impatient with my
+imperfections.  I am therefore doomed not to advance.'
+
+'On the contrary, that is the state guaranteeing ultimate excellence,'
+he said, much disposed to drone about it.
+
+She sighed: 'I fear not.'
+
+He turned the leaves, comparing her modesty with the performance.  The
+third of the leaves was a subject instantly recognized by him.  It
+represented the place he had inherited from Lord Dannisburgh.
+
+He named it.
+
+She smiled: 'You are good enough to see a likeness?  My aunt and I were
+passing it last October, and I waited for a day, to sketch.'
+
+'You have taken it from my favourite point of view.'
+
+'I am glad.'
+
+'How much I should like a copy!'
+
+'If you will accept that?'
+
+'I could not rob you.'
+
+'I can make a duplicate.'
+
+'The look of the place pleases you?'
+
+'Oh! yes; the pines behind it; the sweet little village church; even
+the appearance of the rustics;--it is all impressively old English.
+I suppose you are very seldom there?'
+
+'Does it look like a home to you?'
+
+'No place more!'
+
+'I feel the loneliness.'
+
+'Where I live I feel no loneliness!'
+
+'You have heavenly messengers near you.'
+
+'They do not always come.'
+
+'Would you consent to make the place less lonely to me?'
+
+Her bosom rose.  In deference to her maidenly understanding, she gazed
+inquiringly.
+
+'If you love it!' said he.
+
+'The place?' she said, looking soft at the possessor.
+
+'Constance!'
+
+'Is it true?'
+
+'As you yourself.  Could it be other than true?  This hand is mine?'
+
+'Oh!  Percy.'
+
+Borrowing the world's poetry to describe them, the long prayed-for Summer
+enveloped the melting snows.
+
+So the recollection of Diana's watch beside his uncle's death-bed was
+wiped out.  Ay, and the hissing of her treachery silenced.  This maidenly
+hand put him at peace with the world, instead of his defying it for a
+worthless woman--who could not do better than accept the shelter of her
+husband's house, as she ought to be told, if her friends wished her to
+save her reputation.
+
+Dacier made his way downstairs to Quintin Manx, by whom he was hotly
+congratulated and informed of the extent of the young lady's fortune:
+on the strength of which it was expected that he would certainly speak a
+private word in elucidation of that newspaper article.
+
+'I know nothing of it,' said Dacier, but promised to come and dine.
+Alone in her happiness Constance Asper despatched various brief notes
+under her gold-symbolled crest to sisterly friends; one to Lady Wathin,
+containing the, single line:
+
+'Your prophesy is confirmed.'
+
+Dacier was comfortably able to face his Club after the excitement of a
+proposal, with a bride on his hands.  He was assaulted concerning the
+article, and he parried capitally.  Say that her lips were rather cold:
+at any rate, they invigorated him.  Her character was guaranteed--not the
+hazy idea of a dupe.  And her fortune would be enormous: a speculation
+merely due to worldly prudence and prospective ambition.
+
+At the dinner-table of four, in the evening, conversation would have
+seemed dull to him, by contrast, had it not, been for the presiding grace
+of his bride, whose habitually eminent feminine air of superiority to the
+repast was throned by her appreciative receptiveness of his looks and
+utterances.  Before leaving her, he won her consent to a very early
+marriage; on the plea of a possibly approaching Session, and also that
+they had waited long.  The consent, notwithstanding the hurry of
+preparations, it involved, besides the annihilation of her desire to
+meditate on so solemn a change in her life and savour the congratulations
+of her friends and have the choir of St. Catherine's rigorously drilled
+in her favourite anthems was beautifully yielded to the pressure of
+circumstances.
+
+There lay on his table at night a letter; a bulky letter.  No need to
+tear it open for sight of the signature: the superscription was redolent
+of that betraying woman.  He tossed it unopened into the fire.
+
+As it was thick, it burned sullenly, discolouring his name on the
+address, as she had done, and still offering him a last chance of viewing
+the contents.  She fought on the consuming fire to have her exculpation
+heard.
+
+But was she not a shameless traitor?  She had caught him by his love of
+his country and hope to serve it.  She had wound into his heart to bleed
+him of all he knew and sell the secrets for money.  A wonderful sort of
+eloquence lay there, on those coals, no doubt.  He felt a slight movement
+of curiosity to glance at two or three random sentences: very slight.
+And why read them now?  They were valueless to him, mere outcries.  He
+judged her by the brute facts.  She and her slowly-consuming letter were
+of a common blackness.  Moreover, to read them when he was plighted to
+another woman would be senseless.  In the discovery of her baseness, she
+had made a poor figure.  Doubtless during the afternoon she had trimmed
+her intuitive Belial art of making 'the worse appear the better cause':
+queer to peruse, and instructive in an unprofitable department of
+knowledge-the tricks of the sex.
+
+He said to himself, with little intuition of the popular taste: She
+wouldn't be a bad heroine of Romance!  He said it derisively of the
+Romantic.  But the right worshipful heroine of Romance was the front-face
+female picture he had won for his walls.  Poor Diana was the flecked
+heroine of Reality: not always the same; not impeccable; not an ignorant-
+innocent, nor a guileless: good under good leading; devoted to the death
+in a grave crisis; often wrestling with her terrestrial nature nobly; and
+a growing soul; but not one whose purity was carved in marble for the
+assurance to an Englishman that his possession of the changeless thing
+defies time and his fellows, is the pillar of his home and universally
+enviable.  Your fair one of Romance cannot suffer a mishap without a
+plotting villain, perchance many of them; to wreak the dread iniquity:
+she cannot move without him; she is the marble block, and if she is to
+have a feature, he is the sculptor; she depends on him for life, and her
+human history at least is married to him far more than to the rescuing
+lover.  No wonder, then, that men should find her thrice cherishable
+featureless, or with the most moderate possible indication of a
+countenance.  Thousands of the excellent simple creatures do; and every
+reader of her tale.  On the contrary, the heroine of Reality is that
+woman whom you have met or heard of once in your course of years, and
+very probably despised for bearing in her composition the motive
+principle; at best, you say, a singular mixture of good and bad; anything
+but the feminine ideal of man.  Feature to some excess, you think,
+distinguishes her.  Yet she furnishes not any of the sweet sensual
+excitement pertaining to her spotless rival pursued by villany.  She
+knocks at the doors of the mind, and the mind must open to be interested
+in her.  Mind and heart must be wide open to excuse her sheer descent
+from the pure ideal of man.
+
+Dacier's wandering reflections all came back in crowds to the judicial
+Bench of the Black Cap.  He felt finely, apart from the treason, that her
+want of money degraded her: him too, by contact.  Money she might have
+had to any extent: upon application for it, of course.  How was he to
+imagine that she wanted money!  Smilingly as she welcomed him and his
+friends, entertaining them royally, he was bound to think she had means.
+A decent propriety bound him not to think of the matter at all.  He
+naturally supposed she was capable of conducting her affairs.  And--
+money!  It soiled his memory: though the hour at Rovio was rather pretty,
+and the scene at Copsley touching: other times also, short glimpses of
+the woman, were taking.  The flood of her treachery effaced them.  And
+why reflect?  Constance called to him to look her way.
+
+Diana's letter died hard.  The corners were burnt to black tissue, with
+an edge or two of discoloured paper.  A small frayed central heap still
+resisted, and in kindness to the necessity for privacy, he impressed the
+fire-tongs to complete the execution.  After which he went to his desk
+and worked, under the presidency of Constance.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+A high wind will make a dead leaf fly like a bird
+Beware the silent one of an assembly!
+Brittle is foredoomed
+Common sense is the secret of every successful civil agitation
+Its glee at a catastrophe; its poor stock of mercy
+Money is of course a rough test of virtue
+Salt of earth, to whom their salt must serve for nourishment
+Sentimentality puts up infant hands for absolution
+She herself did not like to be seen eating in public
+Slightest taste for comic analysis that does not tumble to farce
+The greed of gain is our volcano
+The man had to be endured, like other doses in politics
+Vagrant compassionateness of sentimentalists
+What might have been
+What the world says, is what the wind says
+Without those consolatory efforts, useless between men
+
+
+
+
+[The End]
+
+
+
+
+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Diana of the Crossways, v4, by Meredith
+********This file should be named gm74v10.txt or gm74v10.zip********
+
+Corrected EDITIONS of our etexts get a new NUMBER, gm74v11.txt
+VERSIONS based on separate sources get new LETTER, gm74v10a.txt
+
+This etext was produced by David Widger <widger@cecomet.net>
+
+More information about this book is at the top of this file.
+
+We are now trying to release all our etexts one year in advance
+of the official release dates, leaving time for better editing.
+Please be encouraged to tell us about any error or corrections,
+even years after the official publication date.
+
+Please note neither this listing nor its contents are final til
+midnight of the last day of the month of any such announcement.
+The official release date of all Project Gutenberg Etexts is at
+Midnight, Central Time, of the last day of the stated month.  A
+preliminary version may often be posted for suggestion, comment
+and editing by those who wish to do so.
+
+Most people start at our Web sites at:
+https://gutenberg.org or
+http://promo.net/pg
+
+These Web sites include award-winning information about Project
+Gutenberg, including how to donate, how to help produce our new
+etexts, and how to subscribe to our email newsletter (free!).
+
+
+Those of you who want to download any Etext before announcement
+can get to them as follows, and just download by date.  This is
+also a good way to get them instantly upon announcement, as the
+indexes our cataloguers produce obviously take a while after an
+announcement goes out in the Project Gutenberg Newsletter.
+
+http://www.ibiblio.org/gutenberg/etext03 or
+ftp://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/etext03
+
+Or /etext02, 01, 00, 99, 98, 97, 96, 95, 94, 93, 92, 92, 91 or 90
+
+Just search by the first five letters of the filename you want,
+as it appears in our Newsletters.
+
+
+Information about Project Gutenberg (one page)
+
+We produce about two million dollars for each hour we work.  The
+time it takes us, a rather conservative estimate, is fifty hours
+to get any eBook selected, entered, proofread, edited, copyright
+searched and analyzed, the copyright letters written, etc.   Our
+projected audience is one hundred million readers.  If the value
+per text is nominally estimated at one dollar then we produce $2
+million dollars per hour in 2002 as we release over 100 new text
+files per month:  1240 more eBooks in 2001 for a total of 4000+
+We are already on our way to trying for 2000 more eBooks in 2002
+If they reach just 1-2% of the world's population then the total
+will reach over half a trillion eBooks given away by year's end.
+
+The Goal of Project Gutenberg is to Give Away 1 Trillion eBooks!
+This is ten thousand titles each to one hundred million readers,
+which is only about 4% of the present number of computer users.
+
+Here is the briefest record of our progress (* means estimated):
+
+eBooks Year Month
+
+    1  1971 July
+   10  1991 January
+  100  1994 January
+ 1000  1997 August
+ 1500  1998 October
+ 2000  1999 December
+ 2500  2000 December
+ 3000  2001 November
+ 4000  2001 October/November
+ 6000  2002 December*
+ 9000  2003 November*
+10000  2004 January*
+
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation has been created
+to secure a future for Project Gutenberg into the next millennium.
+
+We need your donations more than ever!
+
+As of February, 2002, contributions are being solicited from people
+and organizations in: Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Connecticut,
+Delaware, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois,
+Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts,
+Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New
+Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio,
+Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South
+Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West
+Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.
+
+We have filed in all 50 states now, but these are the only ones
+that have responded.
+
+As the requirements for other states are met, additions to this list
+will be made and fund raising will begin in the additional states.
+Please feel free to ask to check the status of your state.
+
+In answer to various questions we have received on this:
+
+We are constantly working on finishing the paperwork to legally
+request donations in all 50 states.  If your state is not listed and
+you would like to know if we have added it since the list you have,
+just ask.
+
+While we cannot solicit donations from people in states where we are
+not yet registered, we know of no prohibition against accepting
+donations from donors in these states who approach us with an offer to
+donate.
+
+International donations are accepted, but we don't know ANYTHING about
+how to make them tax-deductible, or even if they CAN be made
+deductible, and don't have the staff to handle it even if there are
+ways.
+
+The most recent list of states, along with all methods for donations
+(including credit card donations and international donations), may be
+found online at https://www.gutenberg.org/donation.html
+
+Donations by check or money order may be sent to:
+
+Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+PMB 113
+1739 University Ave.
+Oxford, MS 38655-4109
+
+Contact us if you want to arrange for a wire transfer or payment
+method other than by check or money order.
+
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation has been approved by
+the US Internal Revenue Service as a 501(c)(3) organization with EIN
+[Employee Identification Number] 64-622154.  Donations are
+tax-deductible to the maximum extent permitted by law.  As fund-raising
+requirements for other states are met, additions to this list will be
+made and fund-raising will begin in the additional states.
+
+We need your donations more than ever!
+
+You can get up to date donation information at:
+
+https://www.gutenberg.org/donation.html
+
+
+***
+
+If you can't reach Project Gutenberg,
+you can always email directly to:
+
+Michael S. Hart <hart@pobox.com>
+
+Prof. Hart will answer or forward your message.
+
+We would prefer to send you information by email.
+
+
+**The Legal Small Print**
+
+
+(Three Pages)
+
+***START**THE SMALL PRINT!**FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS**START***
+Why is this "Small Print!" statement here? You know: lawyers.
+They tell us you might sue us if there is something wrong with
+your copy of this etext, even if you got it for free from
+someone other than us, and even if what's wrong is not our
+fault. So, among other things, this "Small Print!" statement
+disclaims most of our liability to you. It also tells you how
+you may distribute copies of this etext if you want to.
+
+*BEFORE!* YOU USE OR READ THIS ETEXT
+By using or reading any part of this PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm
+etext, you indicate that you understand, agree to and accept
+this "Small Print!" statement. If you do not, you can receive
+a refund of the money (if any) you paid for this etext by
+sending a request within 30 days of receiving it to the person
+you got it from. If you received this etext on a physical
+medium (such as a disk), you must return it with your request.
+
+ABOUT PROJECT GUTENBERG-TM ETEXTS
+This PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm etext, like most PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm etexts,
+is a "public domain" work distributed by Professor Michael S. Hart
+through the Project Gutenberg Association (the "Project").
+Among other things, this means that no one owns a United States copyright
+on or for this work, so the Project (and you!) can copy and
+distribute it in the United States without permission and
+without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth
+below, apply if you wish to copy and distribute this etext
+under the "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark.
+
+Please do not use the "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark to market
+any commercial products without permission.
+
+To create these etexts, the Project expends considerable
+efforts to identify, transcribe and proofread public domain
+works. Despite these efforts, the Project's etexts and any
+medium they may be on may contain "Defects". Among other
+things, Defects may take the form of incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
+intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged
+disk or other etext medium, a computer virus, or computer
+codes that damage or cannot be read by your equipment.
+
+LIMITED WARRANTY; DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES
+But for the "Right of Replacement or Refund" described below,
+[1] Michael Hart and the Foundation (and any other party you may
+receive this etext from as a PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm etext) disclaims
+all liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including
+legal fees, and [2] YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE OR
+UNDER STRICT LIABILITY, OR FOR BREACH OF WARRANTY OR CONTRACT,
+INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE
+OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES, EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE
+POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.
+
+If you discover a Defect in this etext within 90 days of
+receiving it, you can receive a refund of the money (if any)
+you paid for it by sending an explanatory note within that
+time to the person you received it from. If you received it
+on a physical medium, you must return it with your note, and
+such person may choose to alternatively give you a replacement
+copy. If you received it electronically, such person may
+choose to alternatively give you a second opportunity to
+receive it electronically.
+
+THIS ETEXT IS OTHERWISE PROVIDED TO YOU "AS-IS". NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, ARE MADE TO YOU AS
+TO THE ETEXT OR ANY MEDIUM IT MAY BE ON, INCLUDING BUT NOT
+LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A
+PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
+
+Some states do not allow disclaimers of implied warranties or
+the exclusion or limitation of consequential damages, so the
+above disclaimers and exclusions may not apply to you, and you
+may have other legal rights.
+
+INDEMNITY
+You will indemnify and hold Michael Hart, the Foundation,
+and its trustees and agents, and any volunteers associated
+with the production and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm
+texts harmless, from all liability, cost and expense, including
+legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of the
+following that you do or cause:  [1] distribution of this etext,
+[2] alteration, modification, or addition to the etext,
+or [3] any Defect.
+
+DISTRIBUTION UNDER "PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm"
+You may distribute copies of this etext electronically, or by
+disk, book or any other medium if you either delete this
+"Small Print!" and all other references to Project Gutenberg,
+or:
+
+[1]  Only give exact copies of it.  Among other things, this
+     requires that you do not remove, alter or modify the
+     etext or this "small print!" statement.  You may however,
+     if you wish, distribute this etext in machine readable
+     binary, compressed, mark-up, or proprietary form,
+     including any form resulting from conversion by word
+     processing or hypertext software, but only so long as
+     *EITHER*:
+
+     [*]  The etext, when displayed, is clearly readable, and
+          does *not* contain characters other than those
+          intended by the author of the work, although tilde
+          (~), asterisk (*) and underline (_) characters may
+          be used to convey punctuation intended by the
+          author, and additional characters may be used to
+          indicate hypertext links; OR
+
+     [*]  The etext may be readily converted by the reader at
+          no expense into plain ASCII, EBCDIC or equivalent
+          form by the program that displays the etext (as is
+          the case, for instance, with most word processors);
+          OR
+
+     [*]  You provide, or agree to also provide on request at
+          no additional cost, fee or expense, a copy of the
+          etext in its original plain ASCII form (or in EBCDIC
+          or other equivalent proprietary form).
+
+[2]  Honor the etext refund and replacement provisions of this
+     "Small Print!" statement.
+
+[3]  Pay a trademark license fee to the Foundation of 20% of the
+     gross profits you derive calculated using the method you
+     already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  If you
+     don't derive profits, no royalty is due.  Royalties are
+     payable to "Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation"
+     the 60 days following each date you prepare (or were
+     legally required to prepare) your annual (or equivalent
+     periodic) tax return.  Please contact us beforehand to
+     let us know your plans and to work out the details.
+
+WHAT IF YOU *WANT* TO SEND MONEY EVEN IF YOU DON'T HAVE TO?
+Project Gutenberg is dedicated to increasing the number of
+public domain and licensed works that can be freely distributed
+in machine readable form.
+
+The Project gratefully accepts contributions of money, time,
+public domain materials, or royalty free copyright licenses.
+Money should be paid to the:
+"Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+If you are interested in contributing scanning equipment or
+software or other items, please contact Michael Hart at:
+hart@pobox.com
+
+[Portions of this header are copyright (C) 2001 by Michael S. Hart
+and may be reprinted only when these Etexts are free of all fees.]
+[Project Gutenberg is a TradeMark and may not be used in any sales
+of Project Gutenberg Etexts or other materials be they hardware or
+software or any other related product without express permission.]
+
+*END THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS*Ver.10/04/01*END*
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg etext of Diana of the Crossways, v4,
+by George Meredith
+
diff --git a/old/4468.zip b/old/4468.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..dade476
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/4468.zip