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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 4469 ***
+
+DIANA OF THE CROSSWAYS
+
+By George Meredith
+
+1897
+
+
+
+BOOK 5.
+
+XXXVI.    IS CONCLUSIVE AS TO THE HEARTLESSNESS OF WOMEN WITH BRAINS
+XXXVII.   AN EXHIBITION OF SOME CHAMPIONS OF THE STRICKEN LADY
+XXXVIII.  CONVALESCENCE OF A HEALTHY MIND DISTRAUGHT
+XXXIX.    OF NATURE WITH ONE OF HER CULTIVATED DAUGHTERS AND A SHORT
+          EXCURSION IN ANTI-CLIMAX
+XL.       IN WHICH WE SEE NATURE MAKING OF A WOMAN A MAID AGAIN, AND A
+          THRICE WHIMSICAL
+XLI.      CONTAINS A REVELATION OF THE ORIGIN OF THE TIGRESS IN DIANA
+XLII.     THE PENULTIMATE : SHOWING A FINAL STRUGGLE FOR LIBERTY AND RUN
+          INTO HARNESS
+XLIII.    NUPTIAL CHAPTER: AND OF HOW A BARELY WILLING WOMAN WAS LED TO
+          BLOOM WITH NUPTIAL SENTIMENT
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVI
+
+IS CONCLUSIVE AS TO THE HEARTLESSNESS OF WOMEN WITH BRAINS
+
+Hymenaeal rumours are those which might be backed to run a victorious
+race with the tale of evil fortune; and clearly for the reason that man's
+livelier half is ever alert to speed them.  They travel with an
+astonishing celerity over the land, like flames of the dry beacon-faggots
+of old time in announcement of the invader or a conquest, gathering as
+they go: wherein, to say nothing of their vastly wider range, they
+surpass the electric wires.  Man's nuptial half is kindlingly concerned
+in the launch of a new couple; it is the business of the fair sex: and
+man himself (very strangely, but nature quickens him still) lends a not
+unfavouring eye to the preparations of the matrimonial vessel for its
+oily descent into the tides, where billows will soon be rising, captain
+and mate soon discussing the fateful question of who is commander.  We
+consent, it appears, to hope again for mankind; here is another chance!
+Or else, assuming the happiness of the pair, that pomp of ceremonial,
+contrasted with the little wind-blown candle they carry between them,
+catches at our weaker fibres.
+
+After so many ships have foundered, some keel up, like poisoned fish, at
+the first drink of water, it is a gallant spectacle, let us avow; and
+either the world perpetuating it is heroical or nature incorrigible in
+the species.  Marriages are unceasing.  Friends do it, and enemies; the
+unknown contractors of this engagement, or armistice, inspire an
+interest.  It certainly is both exciting and comforting to hear that man
+and woman are ready to join in a mutual affirmative, say Yes together
+again.  It sounds like the end of the war.
+
+The proclamation of the proximate marriage of a young Minister of State
+and the greatest heiress of her day; notoriously 'The young Minister of
+State' of a famous book written by the beautiful, now writhing, woman
+madly enamoured of him--and the heiress whose dowry could purchase a
+Duchy; this was a note to make the gossips of England leap from their
+beds at the midnight hour and wag tongues in the market-place.  It did
+away with the political hubbub over the Tonans article, and let it noise
+abroad like nonsense.  The Hon. Percy Dacier espouses Miss Asper; and she
+rescues him from the snares of a siren, he her from the toils of the
+Papists.  She would have gone over to them, she was going when, luckily
+for the Protestant Faith, Percy Dacier intervened with his proposal.
+Town and country buzzed the news; and while that dreary League trumpeted
+about the business of the nation, a people suddenly become Oriental
+chattered of nothing but the blissful union to be celebrated in princely
+state, with every musical accessory, short of Operatic.
+
+Lady Wathin was an active agent in this excitement.  The excellent woman
+enjoyed marriages of High Life: which, as there is presumably wealth to
+support them, are manifestly under sanction: and a marriage that she
+could consider one of her own contrivance, had a delicate flavour of a
+marriage in the family; not quite equal to the seeing a dear daughter of
+her numerous progeny conducted to the altar, but excelling it in the pomp
+that bids the heavens open.  She and no other spread the tidings of Miss
+Asper's debating upon the step to Rome at the very instant of Percy
+Dacier's declaration of his love; and it was a beautiful struggle, that
+of the half-dedicated nun and her deep-rooted earthly passion, love
+prevailing!  She sent word to Lady Dunstane: 'You know the interest I
+have always taken in dear Constance Aspen' etc.; inviting her to come on
+a visit a week before the end of the month, that she might join in the
+ceremony of a wedding 'likely to be the grandest of our time.'  Pitiful
+though it was, to think of the bridal pair having but eight or ten days
+at the outside, for a honeymoon, the beauty of their 'mutual devotion to
+duty' was urged by Lady Wathin upon all hearers.
+
+Lady Dunstane declined the invitation.  She waited to hear from her
+friend, and the days went by; she could only sorrow for her poor Tony,
+divining her state.  However little of wrong in the circumstances, they
+imposed a silence on her decent mind, and no conceivable shape of writing
+would transmit condolences.  She waited, with a dull heartache: by no
+means grieving at Dacier's engagement to the heiress; until Redworth
+animated her, as the bearer of rather startling intelligence, indirectly
+relating to the soul she loved.  An accident in the street had befallen
+Mr. Warwick.  Redworth wanted to know whether Diana should be told of it,
+though he had no particulars to give; and somewhat to his disappointment,
+Lady Dunstane said she would write.  She delayed, thinking the accident
+might not be serious; and the information of it to Diana surely would be
+so.  Next day at noon her visitor was Lady Wathin, evidently perturbed
+and anxious to say more than she dared: but she received no assistance.
+After beating the air in every direction, especially dwelling on the fond
+reciprocal affection of the two devoted lovers, to be united within three
+days' time, Lady Wathin said at last: 'And is it not shocking!  I talk of
+a marriage and am appalled by a death.  That poor man died last night in
+the hospital.  I mean poor Mr. Warwick.  He was recovering, getting
+strong and well, and he was knocked down at a street-crossing and died
+last night.  It is a warning to us!'
+
+'Mr. Redworth happened to hear of it at his Club, near which the accident
+occurred, and he called at the hospital.  Mr. Warwick was then alive,'
+said Lady Dunstane; adding: 'Well, if prevention is better than cure, as
+we hear!  Accidents are the specific for averting the maladies of age,
+which are a certain crop!'
+
+Lady Wathin's eyelids worked and her lips shut fast at the cold-hearted
+remark void of meaning.
+
+She sighed.  'So ends a life of misery, my dear!'
+
+'You are compassionate.'
+
+'I hope so.  But .  .  .  Indeed I must speak, if you will let me.  I
+think of the living.'
+
+Lady Dunstane widened her eyes.  'Of Mrs. Warwick?'
+
+'She has now the freedom she desired.  I think of others.  Forgive me,
+but Constance Asper is to me as a daughter.  I have perhaps no grounds
+for any apprehension.  Love so ardent, so sincere, was never shown by
+bridegroom elect: and it is not extraordinary to those acquainted with
+dear Constance.  But--one may be a worshipped saint and experience
+defection.  The terrible stories one hears of a power of fascination
+almost .  .  .  !' Lady Wathin hung for the word.
+
+'Infernal,' said Lady Dunstane, whose brows had been bent inquiringly.
+'Have no fear.  The freedom you allude to will not be used to interfere
+with any entertainment in prospect.  It was freedom my friend desired.
+Now that her jewel is restored to her, she is not the person to throw it
+away, be sure.  And pray, drop the subject.'
+
+'One may rely .  .  .  you think?'
+
+'Oh!  Oh!'
+
+'This release coming just before the wedding .  .  .  !'
+
+'I should hardly suppose the man to be the puppet you depict, or
+indicate.'
+
+'It is because men--so many--are not puppets that one is conscious of
+alarm.'
+
+'Your previous remark,' said Lady Dunstane, 'sounded superstitious.  Your
+present one has an antipodal basis.  But, as for your alarm, check it:
+and spare me further.  My friend has acknowledged powers.  Considering
+that, she does not use them, you should learn to respect her.'
+
+Lady Wathin bowed stiffly.  She refused to partake of lunch, having, she
+said, satisfied her conscience by the performance of a duty and arranged
+with her flyman to catch a train.  Her cousin Lady Dunstane smiled
+loftily at everything she uttered, and she felt that if a woman like this
+Mrs. Warwick could put division between blood-relatives, she could do
+worse, and was to be dreaded up to the hour of the nuptials.
+
+'I meant no harm in coming,' she said, at the shaking of hands.
+
+'No, no; I understand,' said her hostess: 'you are hen-hearted over your
+adopted brood.  The situation is perceptible and your intention
+creditable.'
+
+As one of the good women of the world, Lady Wathin in departing was
+indignant at the tone and dialect of a younger woman not modestly
+concealing her possession of the larger brain.  Brains in women she both
+dreaded and detested; she believed them to be devilish.  Here were
+instances:--they had driven poor Sir Lukin to evil courses, and that poor
+Mr. Warwick straight under the wheels of a cab.  Sir Lukin's name was
+trotting in public with a naughty Mrs. Fryar-Gunnett's: Mrs. Warwick
+might still trim her arts to baffle the marriage.  Women with brains,
+moreover, are all heartless: they have no pity for distress, no horror of
+catastrophes, no joy in the happiness of the deserving.  Brains in men
+advance a household to station; but brains in women divide it and are the
+wrecking of society.  Fortunately Lady Wathin knew she could rally a
+powerful moral contingent, the aptitude of which for a one-minded
+cohesion enabled it to crush those fractional daughters of mischief.
+She was a really good woman of the world, heading a multitude; the same
+whom you are accustomed to hear exalted; lucky in having had a guided
+girlhood, a thick-curtained prudence; and in having stock in the moral
+funds, shares in the sentimental tramways.  Wherever the world laid its
+hoards or ran its lines, she was found, and forcible enough to be
+eminent; though at fixed hours of the day, even as she washed her hands,
+she abjured worldliness: a performance that cleansed her.  If she did not
+make morality appear loveable to the objects of her dislike, it was owing
+to her want of brains to see the origin, nature and right ends of
+morality.  But a world yet more deficient than she, esteemed her
+cordially for being a bulwark of the present edifice; which looks a
+solid structure when the microscope is not applied to its components.
+
+Supposing Percy Dacier a dishonourable tattler as well as an icy lover,
+and that Lady Wathin, through his bride, had become privy to the secret
+between him and Diana?  There is reason to think that she would have held
+it in terror over the baneful woman, but not have persecuted her: for she
+was by no means the active malignant of theatrical plots.  No, she would
+have charged it upon the possession of brains by women, and have had a
+further motive for inciting the potent dignitary her husband to employ
+his authority to repress the sex's exercise of those fell weapons,
+hurtful alike to them and all coming near them.
+
+So extreme was her dread of Mrs. Warwick, that she drove from the London
+railway station to see Constance and be reassured by her tranquil aspect.
+
+Sweet Constance and her betrothed Percy were together, examining a
+missal.
+
+Lady Dunstane despatched a few words of the facts to Diana.  She hoped to
+hear from her; rather hoped, for the moment, not to see her.  No answer
+came.  The great day of the nuptials came and passed.  She counted on her
+husband's appearance the next morning, as the good gentleman made a point
+of visiting her, to entertain the wife he adored, whenever he had a
+wallet of gossip that would overlay the blank of his absence.  He had
+been to the church of the wedding--he did not say with whom: all the
+world was there; and he rapturously described the ceremony, stating
+that it set women weeping and caused him to behave like a fool.
+
+'You are impressionable,' said his wife.
+
+He murmured something in praise of the institution of marriage--when
+celebrated impressively, it seemed.
+
+'Tony calls the social world "the theatre of appetites," as we have it at
+present,' she said; 'and the world at a wedding is, one may reckon, in
+the second act of the hungry tragicomedy.'
+
+'Yes, there's the breakfast,' Sir Lukin assented.  Mrs. Fryar-Gunnett was
+much more intelligible to him: in fact, quite so, as to her speech.
+
+Emma's heart now yearned to her Tony: Consulting her strength, she
+thought she might journey to London, and on the third morning after the
+Dacier-Asper marriage, she started.
+
+Diana's door was open to Arthur Rhodes when Emma reached it.
+
+'Have you seen her?' she asked him.
+
+His head shook dolefully.  'Mrs. Warwick is unwell; she has been working
+too hard.'
+
+'You also, I'm afraid.'
+
+'No.'  He could deny that, whatever the look of him.
+
+'Come to me at Copsley soon,' said she, entering to Danvers in the
+passage.
+
+'My mistress is upstairs, my lady,' said Danvers.  'She is lying on her
+bed.'
+
+'She is ill?'
+
+'She has been lying on her bed ever since.'
+
+'Since what?' Lady Dunstane spoke sharply.
+
+Danvers retrieved her indiscretion.  'Since she heard of the accident, my
+lady.'
+
+'Take my name to her.  Or no: I can venture.'
+
+'I am not allowed to go in and speak to her.  You will find the room
+quite dark, my lady, and very cold.  It is her command.  My mistress will
+not let me light the fire; and she has not eaten or drunk of anything
+since . . . .  She will die, if you do not persuade her to take
+nourishment: a little, for a beginning.  It wants the beginning.'
+
+Emma went upstairs, thinking of the enigmatical maid, that she must be a
+good soul after all.  Diana's bedroom door was opened slowly.
+
+'You will not be able to see at first, my lady,' Danvers whispered.  'The
+bed is to the left, and a chair.  I would bring in a candle, but it hurts
+her eyes.  She forbids it.'
+
+Emma stepped in.  The chill thick air of the unlighted London room was
+cavernous.  She almost forgot the beloved of her heart in the thought
+that a living woman had been lying here more than two days and nights,
+fasting.  The proof of an uttermost misery revived the circumstances
+within her to render her friend's presence in this desert of darkness
+credible.  She found the bed by touch, silently, and distinguished a dark
+heap on the bed; she heard no breathing.  She sat and listened; then she
+stretched out her hand and met her Tony's.  It lay open.  It was the hand
+of a drowned woman.
+
+Shutters and curtains and the fireless grate gave the room an appalling
+likeness to the vaults.
+
+So like to the home of death it seemed, that in a few minutes the watcher
+had lost count of time and kept but a wormy memory of the daylight.  She
+dared not speak, for some fear of startling; for the worse fear of never
+getting answer.  Tony's hand was lifeless.  Her clasp of it struck no
+warmth.
+
+She stung herself with bitter reproaches for having let common mundane
+sentiments, worthy of a Lady Wathin, bar her instant offer of her bosom
+to the beloved who suffered in this depth of mortal agony.  Tony's love
+of a man, as she should have known, would be wrought of the elements of
+our being: when other women named Happiness, she said Life; in division,
+Death.  Her body lying still upon the bed here was a soul borne onward by
+the river of Death.
+
+The darkness gave sight after a while, like a curtain lifting on a veil:
+the dead light of the underworld.  Tony lay with her face up, her
+underlip dropped; straight from head to feet.  The outline of her face,
+without hue of it, could be seen: sign of the hapless women that have
+souls in love.  Hateful love of men!  Emma thought, and was; moved to
+feel at the wrist for her darling's pulse.  He has, killed her!  the
+thought flashed, as, with pangs chilling her frame, the pressure at the
+wrist continued insensible of the faintest beat.  She clasped it,
+trembling, in pain to stop an outcry.
+
+'It is Emmy,' said the voice.
+
+Emma's heart sprang to heaven on a rush of thanks.
+
+'My Tony,' she breathed softly.
+
+She hung for a further proof of life in the motionless body.  'Tony!' she
+said.
+
+The answer was at her hand, a thread-like return of her clasp.
+
+'It is Emmy come to stay with you, never to leave you.'
+
+The thin still answer was at her hand a moment; the fingers fell away.
+A deep breath was taken twice to say:
+
+'Don't talk to me.'
+
+Emma retained the hand.  She was warned not to press it by the deadness
+following its effort to reply.
+
+But Tony lived; she had given proof of life.  Over this little wavering
+taper in the vaults Emma cowered, cherishing the hand, silently hoping
+for the voice.
+
+It came: 'Winter.'
+
+'It is a cold winter, Tony.'
+
+'My dear will be cold.'
+
+'I will light the fire.'
+
+Emma lost no time in deciding to seek the match-box.  The fire was lit
+and it flamed; it seemed a revival in the room.  Coming back to the
+bedside, she discerned her Tony's lacklustre large dark eyes and her
+hollow cheeks: her mouth open to air as to the drawing-in of a sword;
+rather as to the releaser than the sustainer.  Her feet were on the rug
+her maid had placed to cover them.  Emma leaned across the bed to put
+them to her breast, beneath her fur mantle, and held them there despite
+the half-animate tug of the limbs and the shaft of iciness they sent to
+her very heart.  When she had restored them to some warmth, she threw
+aside her bonnet and lying beside Tony, took her in her arms, heaving now
+and then a deep sigh.
+
+She kissed her cheek.
+
+'It is Emmy.'
+
+'Kiss her.'
+
+'I have no strength.'
+
+Emma laid her face on the lips.  They were cold; even the breath between
+them cold.
+
+'Has Emmy been long .  .  .?'
+
+'Here, dear?  I think so.  I am with my darling.'
+
+Tony moaned.  The warmth and the love were bringing back her anguish.
+
+She said: 'I have been happy.  It is not hard to go.'
+
+Emma strained to her.  'Tony will wait for her soul's own soul to go, the
+two together.'
+
+There was a faint convulsion in the body.  'If I cry, I shall go in
+pain.'
+
+'You are in Emmy's arms, my beloved.'
+
+Tony's eyes closed for forgetfulness under that sensation.  A tear ran
+down from her, but the pain was lag and neighboured sleep, like the
+pleasure.
+
+So passed the short winter day, little spoken.
+
+Then Emma bethought her of a way of leading Tony to take food, and she
+said: 'I shall stay with you; I shall send for clothes; I am rather
+hungry.  Don't stir, dear.  I will be mistress of the house.'
+
+She went below to the kitchen, where a few words in the ear of a
+Frenchwoman were sufficient to waken immediate comprehension of what was
+wanted, and smart service: within ten minutes an appetizing bouillon sent
+its odour over the bedroom.  Tony, days back, had said her last to the
+act of eating; but Emma sipping at the spoon and expressing satisfaction,
+was a pleasant picture.  The bouillon smelt pleasantly.
+
+'Your servants love you,' Emma said.
+
+'Ah, poor good souls.'
+
+'They crowded up to me to hear of you.  Madame of course at the first
+word was off to her pots.  And we English have the habit of calling
+ourselves the practical people!--This bouillon is consummate.--However,
+we have the virtues of barbarians; we can love and serve for love.  I
+never tasted anything so good.  I could become a glutton.'
+
+'Do,' said Tony.
+
+'I should be ashamed to "drain the bowl" all to myself: a solitary toper
+is a horrid creature, unless he makes a song of it.'
+
+'Emmy makes a song of it to me.'
+
+'But "pledge me" is a noble saying, when you think of humanity's original
+hunger for the whole.  It is there that our civilizing commenced, and I
+am particularly fond of hearing the call.  It is grandly historic.  So
+pledge me, Tony.  We two can feed from one spoon; it is a closer, bond
+than the loving cup.  I want you just to taste it and excuse my
+gluttony.'
+
+Tony murmured, 'No.'  The spoon was put to her mouth.  She sighed to
+resist.  The stronger will compelled her to move her lips.  Emma fed her
+as a child, and nature sucked for life.
+
+The first effect was a gush of tears.
+
+Emma lay with her that night, when the patient was, the better sleeper.
+But during the night at intervals she had the happiness of feeling Tony's
+hand travelling to make sure of her.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVII
+
+AN EXHIBITION OF SOME CHAMPIONS OF THE STRICKEN LADY
+
+Close upon the hour of ten every morning the fortuitous meeting of two
+gentlemen at Mrs. Warwick's housedoor was a signal for punctiliously
+stately greetings, the salutation of the raised hat and a bow of the head
+from a position of military erectness, followed by the remark: 'I trust
+you are well, sir': to which the reply: 'I am very well, sir, and trust
+you are the same,' was deemed a complimentary fulfilment of their mutual
+obligation in presence.  Mr. Sullivan Smith's initiative imparted this
+exercise of formal manners to Mr. Arthur Rhodes, whose renewed
+appearance, at the minute of his own arrival, he viewed, as he did not
+conceal, with a disappointed and a reproving eye.  The inquiry after the
+state of Mrs. Warwick's health having received its tolerably comforting
+answer from the footman, they left their cards in turn, then descended
+the doorsteps, faced for the performance of the salute, and departed
+their contrary ways.
+
+The pleasing intelligence refreshed them one morning, that they would.
+be welcomed by Lady Dunstane.  Thereupon Mr. Sullivan Smith wheeled about
+to Mr. Arthur Rhodes and observed to him: 'Sir, I might claim, by right
+of seniority, to be the foremost of us two in offering my respects to the
+lady, but the way is open to you.'
+
+'Sir,' said Mr. Arthur Rhodes, 'permit me to defer to your many superior
+titles to that distinction.'
+
+'The honour, sir, lies rather in the bestowing than in the taking.'
+
+'I venture to think, sir, that though I cannot speak pure Castilian, I
+require no lesson from a Grandee of Spain in acknowledging the dues of my
+betters.'
+
+'I will avow myself conquered, sir, by your overpowering condescension;'
+said Mr. Sullivan Smith; 'and I entreat you--to ascribe my acceptance of
+your brief retirement to the urgent character of the business I have at
+heart.'
+
+He laid his fingers on the panting spot, and bowed.
+
+Mr. Arthur Rhodes, likewise bowing, deferentially fell to rearward.
+
+'If I mistake not,' said the Irish gentleman, 'I am indebted to Mr.
+Rhodes; and we have been joint participators in the hospitality of Mrs.
+Warwick's table.'
+
+The English gentleman replied: 'It was there that I first had the
+pleasure of an acquaintance which is graven on my memory, as the words of
+the wise king on tablets of gold and silver.'
+
+Mr. Sullivan Smith gravely smiled at the unwonted match he had found in
+ceremonious humour, in Saxonland, and saying: 'I shall not long detain
+you, Mr. Rhodes,' he passed through the doorway.
+
+Arthur waited for him, pacing up and down, for a quarter of an hour,
+when a totally different man reappeared in the same person, and was the
+Sullivan Smith of the rosy beaming features and princely heartiness.  He
+was accosted: 'Now, my dear boy, it's your turn to try if you have a
+chance, and good luck go with ye.  I've said what I could on your behalf,
+for you're one of ten thousand in this country, you are.'
+
+Mr. Sullivan Smith had solemnified himself to proffer a sober petition
+within the walls of the newly widowed lady's house; namely, for nothing
+less than that sweet lady's now unfettered hand: and it had therefore
+been perfectly natural to him, until his performance ended with the
+destruction of his hopes, to deliver himself in the high Castilian
+manner.  Quite unexpected, however, was the reciprocal loftiness of
+tone spontaneously adopted by the young English squire, for whom, in
+consequence, he conceived a cordial relish; and as he paced in the
+footsteps of Arthur, anxious to quiet his curiosity by hearing how it
+had fared with one whom he had to suppose the second applicant, he kept
+ejaculating: 'Not a bit!  The fellow can't be Saxon!  And she had a
+liking for him.  She's nigh coming of the age when a woman takes to the
+chicks.  Better he than another, if it's to be any one.  For he's got fun
+in him; he carries his own condiments, instead of borrowing from the
+popular castors, as is their way over here.  But I might have known there
+'s always sure to be salt and savour in the man she covers with her wing.
+Excepting, if you please, my dear lady, a bad shot you made at a rascal
+cur, no more worthy of you than Beelzebub of Paradise.  No matter!  The
+daughters' of Erin must share the fate of their mother Isle, that their
+tears may shine in the burst of sun to follow.  For personal and
+patriotic motives, I would have cheered her and been like a wild ass
+combed and groomed and tamed by the adorable creature.  But her friend
+says there 's not a whisk of a chance for me, and I must roam the desert,
+kicking up, and worshipping the star I hail brightest.  They know me not,
+who think I can't worship.  Why, what were I without my star?  At best a
+pickled porker.'
+
+Sullivan Smith became aware of a ravishing melodiousness in the
+soliloquy, as well as a clean resemblance in the simile.  He would
+certainly have proceeded to improvize impassioned verse, if he had not
+seen Arthur Rhodes on the pavement.  'So, here's the boy.  Query, the
+face he wears.'
+
+'How kind of you to wait,' said Arthur.
+
+'We'll call it sympathy, for convenience,' rejoined Sullivan Smith.
+'Well, and what next?'
+
+'You know as much as I do.  Thank heaven, she is recovering.'
+
+'Is that all?'
+
+'Why, what more?'
+
+Arthur was jealously, inspected.
+
+'You look open-hearted, my dear boy.'  Sullivan Smith blew the sound of a
+reflected ahem.  'Excuse me for cornemusing in your company,' he said.
+'But seriously, there was only one thing to pardon your hurrying to the
+lady's door at such a season, when the wind tells tales to the world.
+She's down with a cold, you know.'
+
+'An influenza,' said Arthur.
+
+The simplicity of the acquiescence was vexatious to a champion desirous
+of hostilities, to vindicate the lady, in addition to his anxiety to
+cloak her sad plight.
+
+'She caught it from contact with one of the inhabitants of this country.
+'Tis the fate of us Irish, and we're condemned to it for the sin of
+getting tired of our own.  I begin to sneeze when I land at Holyhead.
+Unbutton a waistcoat here, in the hope of meeting a heart, and you're
+lucky in escaping a pulmonary attack of no common severity, while the dog
+that infected you scampers off, to celebrate his honeymoon mayhap.  Ah,
+but call at her house in shoals, the world 'll soon be saying it's worse
+than a coughing cold.  If you came to lead her out of it in triumph, the
+laugh 'd be with you, and the lady well covered.  D' ye understand?'
+
+The allusion to the dog's honeymoon had put Arthur Rhodes on the track of
+the darting cracker-metaphor.
+
+'I think I do,' he said.  'She will soon be at Copsley--Lady Dunstane's
+house, on the hills--and there we can see her.'
+
+'And that's next to the happiness of consoling--if only it had been
+granted!  She's not an ordinary widow, to be caught when the tear of
+lamentation has opened a practicable path or water-way to the poor
+nightcapped jewel within.  So, and you're a candid admirer, Mr. Rhodes!
+Well, and I'll be one with you; for there's not a star in the firmament
+more deserving of homage than that lady.'
+
+'Let's walk in the park and talk of her,' said Arthur.  'There's no
+sweeter subject to me.'
+
+His boyish frankness rejoiced Sullivan Smith.  'As long as you like!--nor
+to me!' he exclaimed.  'And that ever since I first beheld her on the
+night of a Ball in Dublin: before I had listened to a word of her
+speaking: and she bore her father's Irish name:--none of your Warwicks
+and your .  .  .  But let the cur go barking.  He can't tell what he's
+lost; perhaps he doesn't care.  And after inflicting his hydrophobia on
+her tender fame!  Pooh, sir; you call it a civilized country, where you
+and I and dozens of others are ready to start up as brothers of the lady,
+to defend her, and are paralyzed by the Law.  'Tis a law they've
+instituted for the protection of dirty dogs--their majority!'
+
+'I owe more to Mrs. Warwick than to any soul I know,' said Arthur.
+
+' Let 's hear,' quoth Sullivan Smith; proceeding: 'She's the Arabian
+Nights in person, that's sure; and Shakespeare's Plays, tragic and comic;
+and the Book of Celtic History; and Erin incarnate--down with a cold,
+no matter where; but we know where it was caught.  So there's a pretty
+library for who's to own her now she's enfranchized by circumstances; and
+a poetical figure too!'
+
+He subsided for his companion to rhapsodize.
+
+Arthur was overcharged with feeling, and could say only: 'It would be
+another world to me if I lost her.'
+
+'True; but what of the lady?'
+
+'No praise of mine could do her justice.'
+
+'That may be, but it's negative of yourself, and not a portrait of the
+object.  Hasn't she the brain of Socrates--or better, say Minerva, on the
+bust of Venus, and the remainder of her finished off to an exact
+resemblance of her patronymic Goddess of the bow and quiver?'
+
+'She has a wise head and is beautiful.'
+
+'And chaste.'
+
+Arthur reddened: he was prepared to maintain it, could not speak it.
+
+'She is to us in this London, what the run of water was to Theocritus in
+Sicily: the nearest to the visibly divine,' he said, and was applauded.
+
+'Good, and on you go.  Top me a few superlatives on that, and I 'm your
+echo, my friend.  Isn't the seeing and listening to her like sitting
+under the silvery canopy of a fountain in high Summer?'
+
+'All the comparisons are yours,' Arthur said enviously.
+
+'Mr. Rhodes, you are a poet, I believe, and all you require to loosen
+your tongue is a drop of Bacchus, so if you will do me the extreme honour
+to dine with me at my Club this evening, we'll resume the toast that
+should never be uttered dry.  You reprove me justly, my friend.'
+
+Arthur laughed and accepted.  The Club was named, and the hour, and some
+items of the little dinner: the birds and the year of the wines.
+
+It surprised him to meet Mr. Redworth at the table of his host.  A
+greater surprise was the partial thaw in Redworth's bearing toward him.
+But, as it was partial, and he a youth and poor, not even the genial
+influences of Bacchus could lift him to loosen his tongue under the
+repressing presence of the man he knew to be his censor, though Sullivan
+Smith encouraged him with praises and opportunities.  He thought of the
+many occasions when Mrs. Warwick's art of management had produced a tacit
+harmony between them.  She had no peer.  The dinner failed of the
+pleasure he had expected from it.  Redworth's bluntness killed the flying
+metaphors, and at the end of the entertainment he and Sullivan Smith were
+drumming upon politics.
+
+'Fancies he has the key of the Irish difficulty!' said the latter,
+clapping hand on his shoulder, by way of blessing, as they parted at the
+Club-steps.
+
+Redworth asked Arthur Rhodes the way he was going, and walked beside him.
+
+'I suppose you take exercise; don't get colds and that kind of thing,' he
+remarked in the old bullying fashion; and changed it abruptly.  'I am
+glad to have met you this evening.  I hope you'll dine with me one day
+next week.  Have you seen Mrs. Warwick lately?'
+
+'She is unwell; she has been working too hard,' said Arthur.
+
+'Seriously unwell, do you mean?'
+
+'Lady Dunstane is at her house, and speaks of her recovering.'
+
+'Ah.  You've not seen her?'
+
+'Not yet.'
+
+'Well, good-night.'
+
+Redworth left him, and only when moved by gratitude to the lad for his
+mention of Mrs. Warwick's 'working too hard,' as the cause of her
+illness, recollected the promised dinner and the need for having his
+address.
+
+He had met Sullivan Smith accidentally in the morning and accepted the
+invitation to meet young Rhodes, because these two, of all men living,
+were for the moment dearest to him, as Diana Warwick's true and simple
+champions; and he had intended a perfect cordiality toward them both; the
+end being a semi-wrangle with the patriot, and a patronizing bluntness
+with the boy; who, by the way, would hardly think him sincere in the
+offer of a seat at his table.  He owned himself incomplete.  He never
+could do the thing he meant, in the small matters not leading to fortune.
+But they led to happiness!  Redworth was guilty of a sigh: for now Diana
+Warwick stood free; doubly free, he was reduced to reflect in a wavering
+dubiousness.  Her more than inclination for Dacier, witnessed by him, and
+the shot of the world, flying randomly on the subject, had struck this
+cuirassier, making light of his armour, without causing any change of his
+habitual fresh countenance.  As for the scandal, it had never shaken his
+faith in her nature.  He thought of the passion.  His heart struck at
+Diana's, and whatever might by chance be true in the scandal affected him
+little, if but her heart were at liberty.  That was the prize he coveted,
+having long read the nature of the woman and wedded his spirit to it.
+She would complete him.
+
+Of course, infatuated men argue likewise, and scandal does not move them.
+At a glance, the lower instincts and the higher spirit appear equally to
+have the philosophy of overlooking blemishes.  The difference between
+appetite and love is shown when a man, after years of service, can hear
+and see, and admit the possible, and still desire in worship; knowing
+that we of earth are begrimed and must be cleansed for presentation daily
+on our passage through the miry ways, but that our souls, if flame of a
+soul shall have come of the agony of flesh, are beyond the baser
+mischances: partaking of them indeed, but sublimely.  Now Redworth
+believed in the soul of Diana.  For him it burned, and it was a celestial
+radiance about her, unquenched by her shifting fortunes, her wilfulnesses
+and, it might be, errors.  She was a woman and weak; that is, not trained
+for strength.  She was a soul; therefore perpetually pointing to growth
+in purification.  He felt it, and even discerned it of her, if he could
+not have phrased it.  The something sovereignty characteristic that
+aspired in Diana enchained him.  With her, or rather with his thought of
+her soul, he understood the right union of women and men, from the roots
+to the flowering heights of that rare graft.  She gave him comprehension
+of the meaning of love: a word in many mouths, not often explained.  With
+her, wound in his idea of her, he perceived it to signify a new start in
+our existence, a finer shoot of the tree stoutly planted in good gross
+earth; the senses running their live sap, and the minds companioned, and
+the spirits made one by the whole-natured conjunction.  In Booth, a happy
+prospect for the sons and daughters of Earth, divinely indicating more
+than happiness: the speeding of us, compact of what we are, between the
+ascetic rocks and the sensual whirlpools, to the creation of certain
+nobler races, now very dimly imagined.
+
+Singularly enough, the man of these feelings was far from being a social
+rebel.  His Diana conjured them forth in relation to her, but was not on
+his bosom to enlighten him generally.  His notions of citizenship
+tolerated the female Pharisees, as ladies offering us an excellent social
+concrete where quicksands abound, and without quite justifying the Lady
+Wathins and Constance Aspers of the world, whose virtues he could set
+down to accident or to acid blood, he considered them supportable and
+estimable where the Mrs. Fryar-Gunnetts were innumerable, threatening to
+become a majority; as they will constantly do while the sisterhood of the
+chaste are wattled in formalism and throned in sourness.
+
+Thoughts of Diana made phantoms of the reputable and their reverse alike.
+He could not choose but think of her.  She was free; and he too; and they
+were as distant as the horizon sail and the aft-floating castaway.  Her
+passion for Dacier might have burnt out her heart.  And at present he had
+no claim to visit her, dared not intrude.  He would have nothing to say,
+if he went, save to answer questions upon points of business: as to
+which, Lady Dunstane would certainly summon him when he was wanted.
+
+Riding in the park on a frosty morning, he came upon Sir Lukin, who
+looked gloomy and inquired for news of Diana Warwick, saying that his
+wife had forbidden him to call at her house just yet.  'She's got a cold,
+you know,' said Sir Lukin; adding, 'confoundedly hard on women!--eh?
+Obliged to keep up a show.  And I'd swear, by all that's holy, Diana
+Warwick hasn't a spot, not a spot, to reproach herself with.  I fancy
+I ought to know women by this time.  And look here, Redworth, last night
+--that is, I mean yesterday evening, I broke with a woman--a lady of my
+acquaintance, you know, because she would go on scandal-mongering about
+Diana Warwick.  I broke with her.  I told her I'd have out any man who
+abused Diana Warwick, and I broke with her.  By Jove!  Redworth, those
+women can prove spitfires.  They've bags of venom under their tongues,
+barley-sugar though they look--and that's her colour.  But I broke with
+her for good.  I doubt if I shall ever call on her again.  And in point
+of fact, I won't.'
+
+Mrs. Fryar-Gunnett was described in the colouring of the lady.
+
+Sir Lukin, after some further remarks, rode on, and Redworth mused on a
+moral world that allows a woman of Mrs. Fryar-Gunnett's like to hang on
+to it, and to cast a stone at Diana; forgetful, in his championship, that
+Diana was not disallowed a similar licence.
+
+When he saw Emma Dunstane, some days later, she was in her carriage
+driving, as she said, to Lawyerland, for an interview with old Mr.
+Braddock, on her friend's affairs.  He took a seat beside her.  'No, Tony
+is not well,' she replied to his question, under the veil of candour.
+'She is recovering, but she--you can understand--suffered a shock.  She
+is not able to attend to business, and certain things have to be done.'
+
+'I used to be her man of business,' Redworth observed.
+
+'She speaks of your kind services.  This is mere matter for lawyers.'
+
+'She is recovering?'
+
+'You may see her at Copsley next week.  You can come down on Wednesdays
+or Saturdays?'
+
+'Any day.  Tell her I want her opinion upon the state of things.'
+
+'It will please her; but you will have to describe the state of things.'
+
+Emma feared she had said too much.  She tried candour again for
+concealment.  'My poor Tony has been struck down low.  I suppose it is
+like losing a diseased limb:--she has her freedom, at the cost of a blow
+to the system.'
+
+'She may be trusted for having strength,' said Redworth.'
+
+'Yes.'  Emma's mild monosyllable was presently followed by an
+exclamation: 'One has to experience the irony of Fate to comprehend how
+cruel it is!'  Then she remembered that such language was peculiarly
+abhorrent to him.
+
+'Irony of Fate!' he echoed her.  'I thought you were above that literary
+jargon.'
+
+'And I thought I was: or thought it would be put in a dialect practically
+explicable,' she answered, smiling at the lion roused.
+
+'Upon my word,' he burst out, 'I should like to write a book of Fables,
+showing how donkeys get into grinding harness, and dogs lose their bones,
+and fools have their sconces cracked, and all run jabbering of the irony
+of Fate, to escape the annoyance of tracing the causes.  And what are
+they?  nine times out of ten, plain want of patience, or some debt for
+indulgence.  There's a subject:--let some one write, Fables in
+illustration of the irony of Fate: and I'll undertake to tack-on my
+grandmother's maxims for a moral to teach of 'em.  We prate of that irony
+when we slink away from the lesson--the rod we conjure.  And you to talk
+of Fate!  It's the seed we sow, individually or collectively.  I'm bound-
+up in the prosperity of the country, and if the ship is wrecked, it ruins
+my fortune, but not me, unless I'm bound-up in myself.  At least I hope
+that's my case.'
+
+He apologized for intruding Mr. Thomas Redworth.
+
+His hearer looked at him, thinking he required a more finely pointed gift
+of speech for the ironical tongue, but relishing the tonic directness of
+his faculty of reason while she considered that the application of the
+phrase might be brought home to him so as to render 'my Grandmother's
+moral' a conclusion less comfortingly, if quite intelligibly, summary.
+And then she thought of Tony's piteous instance; and thinking with her
+heart, the tears insisted on that bitter irony of the heavens, which
+bestowed the long-withheld and coveted boon when it was empty of value
+or was but as a handful of spices to a shroud.
+
+Perceiving the moisture in her look, Redworth understood that it was
+foolish to talk rationally.  But on her return to her beloved, the real
+quality of the man had overcome her opposing state of sentiment, and she
+spoke of him with an iteration and throb in the voice that set a singular
+query whirring round Diana's ears.  Her senses were too heavy for a
+suspicion.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVIII
+
+CONVALESCENCE OF A HEALTHY MIND DISTRAUGHT
+
+From an abandonment that had the last pleasure of life in a willingness
+to yield it up, Diana rose with her friend's help in some state of
+fortitude, resembling the effort of her feet to bear the weight of her
+body.  She plucked her courage out of the dust to which her heart had
+been scattered, and tasked herself to walk as the world does.  But she
+was indisposed to compassionate herself in the manner of the burdened
+world.  She lashed the creature who could not raise a head like others,
+and made the endurance of torture a support, such as the pride of being
+is to men.  She would not have seen any similarity to pride in it; would
+have deemed it the reverse.  It was in fact the painful gathering of the
+atoms composing pride.  For she had not only suffered; she had done
+wrongly: and when that was acknowledged, by the light of her sufferings
+the wrong-doing appeared gigantic, chorussing eulogies of the man she had
+thought her lover: and who was her lover once, before the crime against
+him.  In the opening of her bosom to Emma, he was painted a noble figure;
+one of those that Romance delights to harass for the sake of ultimately
+the more exquisitely rewarding.  He hated treachery: she had been guilty
+of doing what he most hated.  She glorified him for the incapacity to
+forgive; it was to her mind godlike.  And her excuses of herself?
+
+At the first confession, she said she had none, and sullenly maintained
+that there was none to exonerate.  Little by little her story was
+related--her version of the story: for not even as woman to woman, friend
+to great-hearted friend, pure soul to soul, could Diana tell of the state
+of shivering abjection in which Dacier had left her on the fatal night;
+of the many causes conducing to it, and of the chief.  That was an
+unutterable secret, bound by all the laws of feminine civilization not to
+be betrayed.  Her excessive self-abasement and exaltation of him who had
+struck her down, rendered it difficult to be understood; and not till
+Emma had revolved it and let it ripen in the mind some days could she
+perceive with any clearness her Tony's motives, or mania.  The very word
+Money thickened the riddle: for Tony knew that her friend's purse was her
+own to dip in at her pleasure; yet she, to escape so small an obligation,
+had committed the enormity for which she held the man blameless in
+spurning her.
+
+'You see what I am, Emmy,' Diana said.
+
+'What I do not see, is that he had grounds for striking so cruelly.'
+
+'I proved myself unworthy of him.'
+
+But does a man pretending to love a woman cut at one blow, for such a
+cause, the ties uniting her to him?  Unworthiness of that kind, is not
+commonly the capital offence in love.  Tony's deep prostration and her
+resplendent picture of her judge and executioner, kept Emma questioning
+within herself.  Gradually she became enlightened enough to distinguish
+in the man a known, if not common, type of the externally soft and
+polished, internally hard and relentless, who are equal to the trials of
+love only as long as favouring circumstances and seemings nurse the fair
+object of their courtship.
+
+Her thoughts recurred to the madness driving Tony to betray the secret;
+and the ascent unhelped to get a survey of it and her and the conditions,
+was mountainous.  She toiled up but to enter the regions of cloud; sure
+nevertheless that the obscurity was penetrable and excuses to be
+discovered somewhere.  Having never wanted money herself, she was unable
+perfectly to realize the urgency of the need: she began however to
+comprehend that the very eminent gentleman, before whom all human
+creatures were to bow in humility, had for an extended term considerably
+added to the expenses of Tony's household, by inciting her to give those
+little dinners to his political supporters, and bringing comrades
+perpetually to supper-parties, careless of how it might affect her
+character and her purse.  Surely an honourable man was bound to her in
+honour? Tony's remark: 'I have the reptile in me, dear,' her exaggeration
+of the act, in her resigned despair,--was surely no justification for his
+breaking from her, even though he had discovered a vestige of the common
+'reptile,' to leave her with a stain on her name?--There would not have
+been a question about it if Tony had not exalted him so loftily,
+refusing, in visible pain, to hear him blamed.
+
+Danvers had dressed a bed for Lady Dunstane in her mistress's chamber,
+where often during the night Emma caught a sound of stifled weeping or
+the long falling breath of wakeful grief.  One night she asked whether
+Tony would like to have her by her side.
+
+'No, dear,' was the answer in the dark; 'but you know my old pensioners,
+the blind fifer and his wife; I've been thinking of them.'
+
+'They were paid as they passed down the street yesterday, my love.'
+
+'Yes, dear, I hope so.  But he flourishes his tune so absurdly.  I've
+been thinking, that is the part I have played, instead of doing the
+female's duty of handing round the tin-cup for pennies.  I won't cry any
+more.'
+
+She sighed and turned to sleep, leaving Emma to disburden her heart in
+tears.
+
+For it seemed to her that Tony's intellect was weakened.  She not merely
+abased herself and exalted Dacier preposterously, she had sunk her
+intelligence in her sensations: a state that she used to decry as the sin
+of mankind, the origin of error and blood.
+
+Strangely too, the proposal came from her, or the suggestion of it,
+notwithstanding her subjectedness to the nerves, that she should show
+her face in public.  She said: 'I shall have to run about, Emmy, when I
+can fancy I am able to rattle up to the old mark.  At present, I feel
+like a wrestler who has had a fall.  As soon as the stiffness is over,
+it's best to make an appearance, for the sake of one's backers, though I
+shall never be in the wrestling ring again.'
+
+'That is a good decision--when you feel quite yourself, dear Tony,' Emma
+replied.
+
+'I dare say I have disgraced my sex, but not as they suppose.  I feel my
+new self already, and can make the poor brute go through fire on behalf
+of the old.  What is the task?--merely to drive a face!'
+
+'It is not known.'
+
+'It will be known.'
+
+'But this is a sealed secret.'
+
+'Nothing is a secret that has been spoken.  It 's in the air, and I have
+to breathe to live by it.  And I would rather it were out.  "She betrayed
+him."  Rather that, than have them think--anything!  They will exclaim,
+How could she!  I have been unable to answer it to you--my own heart.
+How?  Oh!  our weakness is the swiftest dog to hunt us; we cannot escape
+it.  But I have the answer for them, that I trust with my whole soul none
+of them would have done the like.'
+
+'None, my Tony, would have taken it to the soul as you do.'
+
+'I talk, dear.  If I took it honestly, I should be dumb, soon dust.
+The moment we begin to speak, the guilty creature is running for cover.
+She could not otherwise exist.  I am sensible of evasion when I open my
+lips.'
+
+'But Tony has told me all.'
+
+'I think I have.  But if you excuse my conduct, I am certain I have not.'
+
+'Dear girl, accounting for it, is not the same as excusing.'
+
+'Who can account for it!  I was caught in a whirl--Oh!  nothing
+supernatural: my weakness; which it pleases me to call a madness--shift
+the ninety-ninth!  When I drove down that night to Mr. Tonans, I am
+certain I had my clear wits, but I felt like a bolt.  I saw things,
+but at too swift a rate for the conscience of them.  Ah! let never
+Necessity draw the bow of our weakness: it is the soul that is winged to
+its perdition.  I remember I was writing a story, named THE MAN OF TWO
+MINDS.  I shall sign it, By the Woman of Two Natures.  If ever it is
+finished.  Capacity for thinking should precede the act of writing.  It
+should; I do not say that it does.  Capacity for assimilating the public
+taste and reproducing it, is the commonest.  The stuff is perishable, but
+it pays us for our labour, and in so doing saves us from becoming
+tricksters.  Now I can see that Mr. Redworth had it in that big head of
+his--the authoress outliving her income!'
+
+'He dared not speak.'
+
+'Why did he not dare?'
+
+'Would it have checked you?'
+
+'I was a shot out of a gun, and I am glad he did not stand in my way.
+What power charged the gun, is another question.  Dada used to say, that
+it is the devil's masterstroke to get us to accuse him.  "So fare ye
+well, old Nickie Ben."  My dear, I am a black sheep; a creature with a
+spotted reputation; I must wash and wash; and not with water--with
+sulphur-flames.'  She sighed.  'I am down there where they burn.  You
+should have let me lie and die.  You were not kind.  I was going
+quietly.'
+
+'My love!' cried Emma, overborne by a despair that she traced to the
+woman's concealment of her bleeding heart, 'you live for me.  Do set your
+mind on that.  Think of what you are bearing, as your debt to Emma.  Will
+you?'
+
+Tony bowed her head mechanically.
+
+'But I am in love with King Death, and must confess it,' she said.  'That
+hideous eating you forced on me, snatched me from him.  And I feel that
+if I had gone, I should have been mercifully forgiven by everybody.'
+
+'Except by me,' said Emma, embracing her.  'Tony would have left her
+friend for her last voyage in mourning.  And my dearest will live to know
+happiness.'
+
+'I have no more belief in it, Emmy.'
+
+'The mistake of the world is to think happiness possible to the senses.'
+
+'Yes; we distil that fine essence through the senses; and the act is
+called the pain of life.  It is the death of them.  So much I understand
+of what our existence must be.  But I may grieve for having done so
+little.'
+
+'That is the sound grief, with hope at the core--not in love with itself
+and wretchedly mortal, as we find self is under every shape it takes;
+especially the chief one.'
+
+'Name it.'
+
+'It is best named Amor.'
+
+There was a writhing in the frame of the hearer, for she did want Love to
+be respected; not shadowed by her misfortune.  Her still-flushed senses
+protested on behalf of the eternalness of the passion, and she was
+obliged to think Emma's cold condemnatory intellect came of the no
+knowledge of it.
+
+A letter from Mr. Tonans, containing an enclosure, was a sharp trial of
+Diana's endurance of the irony of Fate.  She had spoken of the irony in
+allusion to her freedom.  Now that, according to a communication from her
+lawyers, she was independent of the task of writing, the letter which
+paid the price of her misery bruised her heavily.
+
+'Read it and tear it all to strips,' she said in an abhorrence to Emma,
+who rejoined: 'Shall I go at once and see him?'
+
+'Can it serve any end?  But throw it into the fire.  Oh! no simulation of
+virtue.  There was not, I think, a stipulated return for what I did.  But
+I perceive clearly--I can read only by events--that there was an
+understanding.  You behold it.  I went to him to sell it.  He thanks me,
+says I served the good cause well.  I have not that consolation.  If I
+had thought of the cause--of anything high, it would have arrested me.
+On the fire with it!'
+
+The letter and square slip were consumed.  Diana watched the blackening
+papers.
+
+So they cease their sinning, Emmy; and as long as I am in torment, I may
+hope for grace.  We talked of the irony.  It means, the pain of fire.'
+
+'I spoke of the irony to Redworth,' said Emma; 'incidentally, of course.'
+
+'And he fumed?'
+
+'He is really not altogether the Mr. Cuthbert Dering of your caricature.
+He is never less than acceptably rational.  I won't repeat his truisms;
+but he said, or I deduced from what he said, that a grandmother's maxims
+would expound the enigma.'
+
+'Probably the simple is the deep, in relation to the mysteries of life,'
+said Diana, whose wits had been pricked to a momentary activity by the
+letter.  'He behaves wisely; so perhaps we are bound to take his words
+for wisdom.  Much nonsense is talked and written, and he is one of the
+world's reserves, who need no more than enrolling, to make a sturdy
+phalanx of common sense.  It's a pity they are not enlisted and drilled
+to express themselves.'  She relapsed.  'But neither he nor any of them
+could understand my case.'
+
+'He puts the idea of an irony down to the guilt of impatience, Tony.'
+
+'Could there be a keener irony than that?  A friend of Dada's waited
+patiently for a small fortune, and when it arrived, he was a worn-out
+man, just assisted to go decently to his grave.'
+
+'But he may have gained in spirit by his patient waiting.'
+
+'Oh!  true.  We are warmer if we travel on foot sunward, but it is a
+discovery that we are colder if we take to ballooning upward.  The
+material good reverses its benefits the more nearly we clasp it.  All
+life is a lesson that we live to enjoy but in the spirit.  I will brood
+on your saying.'
+
+'It is your own saying, silly Tony, as the only things worth saying
+always, are!' exclaimed Emma, as she smiled happily to see her friend's
+mind reviving, though it was faintly and in the dark.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIX
+
+OF NATURE WITH ONE OF HER CULTIVATED DAUGHTERS AND A SHORT EXCURSION IN
+ANTI-CLIMAX
+
+A mind that after a long season of oblivion in pain returns to
+wakefulness without a keen edge for the world, is much in danger of
+souring permanently.  Diana's love of nature saved her from the dire
+mischance during a two months' residence at Copsley, by stupefying her
+senses to a state like the barely conscious breathing on the verge of
+sleep.  February blew South-west for the pairing of the birds.  A broad
+warm wind rolled clouds of every ambiguity of form in magnitude over
+peeping azure, or skimming upon lakes of blue and lightest green, or
+piling the amphitheatre for majestic sunset.  Or sometimes those
+daughters of the wind flew linked and low, semi-purple, threatening the
+shower they retained and teaching gloom to rouse a songful nest in the
+bosom of the viewer.  Sometimes they were April, variable to soar with
+rain-skirts and sink with sunshafts.  Or they drenched wood and field for
+a day and opened on the high South-western star.  Daughters of the wind,
+but shifty daughters of this wind of the dropping sun, they have to be
+watched to be loved in their transformations.
+
+Diana had Arthur Rhodes and her faithful Leander for walking companions.
+If Arthur said: 'Such a day would be considered melancholy by London
+people,' she thanked him in her heart, as a benefactor who had revealed
+to her things of the deepest.  The simplest were her food.  Thus does
+Nature restore us, by drugging the brain and making her creature
+confidingly animal for its new growth.  She imagined herself to have lost
+the power to think; certainly she had not the striving or the wish.
+Exercise of her limbs to reach a point of prospect, and of her ears and
+eyes to note what bird had piped, what flower was out on the banks, and
+the leaf of what tree it was that lay beneath the budding, satiated her
+daily desires.  She gathered unknowingly a sheaf of landscapes, images,
+keys of dreamed horizons, that opened a world to her at any chance
+breath altering shape or hue: a different world from the one of her
+old ambition.  Her fall had brought her renovatingly to earth, and the
+saving naturalness of the woman recreated her childlike, with shrouded
+recollections of her strange taste of life behind her; with a tempered
+fresh blood to enjoy aimlessly, and what would erewhile have been a
+barrenness to her sensibilities.
+
+In time the craving was evolved for positive knowledge, and shells and
+stones and weeds were deposited on the library-table at Copsley,
+botanical and geological books comparingly examined, Emma Dunstane always
+eager to assist; for the samples wafted her into the heart of the woods.
+Poor Sir Lukin tried three days of their society, and was driven away
+headlong to Club-life.  He sent down Redworth, with whom the walks of the
+zealous inquirers were profitable, though Diana, in acknowledging it to
+herself, reserved a decided preference for her foregone ethereal mood,
+larger, and untroubled by the presence of a man.  The suspicion Emma had
+sown was not excited to an alarming activity; but she began to question:
+could the best of men be simply--a woman's friend?--was not long service
+rather less than a proof of friendship?  She could be blind when her
+heart was on fire for another.  Her passion for her liberty, however,
+received no ominous warning to look to the defences.  He was the same
+blunt speaker, and knotted his brows as queerly as ever at Arthur, in a
+transparent calculation of how this fellow meant to gain his livelihood.
+She wilfully put it to the credit of Arthur's tact that his elder was
+amiable, without denying her debt to the good man for leaving her illness
+and her appearance unmentioned.  He forbore even to scan her features.
+Diana's wan contemplativeness, in which the sparkle of meaning slowly
+rose to flash, as we see a bubble rising from the deeps of crystal
+waters, caught at his heart while he talked his matter-of-fact.  But her
+instinct of a present safety was true.  She and Arthur discovered--and it
+set her first meditating whether she did know the man so very accurately
+--that he had printed, for private circulation, when at Harrow School, a
+little book, a record of his observations in nature.  Lady Dunstane was
+the casual betrayer.  He shrugged at the nonsense of a boy's publishing;
+anybody's publishing he held for a doubtful proof of sanity.  His excuse
+was, that he had not published opinions.  Let us observe, and assist in
+our small sphere; not come mouthing to the footlights!
+
+'We retire,' Diana said, for herself and Arthur.
+
+'The wise thing, is to avoid the position that enforces publishing,' said
+he, to the discomposure of his raw junior.
+
+In the fields he was genially helpful; commending them to the study of
+the South-west wind, if they wanted to forecast the weather and
+understand the climate of our country.  'We have no Seasons, or only a
+shuffle of them.  Old calendars give seven months of the year to the
+Southwest, and that's about the average.  Count on it, you may generally
+reckon what to expect.  When you don't have the excess for a year or two,
+you are drenched the year following.'  He knew every bird by its flight
+and its pipe, habits, tricks, hints of sagacity homely with the original
+human; and his remarks on the sensitive life of trees and herbs were a
+spell to his thirsty hearers.  Something of astronomy he knew; but in
+relation to that science, he sank his voice, touchingly to Diana, who
+felt drawn to kinship with him when he had a pupil's tone.  An allusion
+by Arthur to the poetical work of Aratus, led to a memorably pleasant
+evening's discourse upon the long reading of the stars by these our
+mortal eyes.  Altogether the mind of the practical man became
+distinguishable to them as that of a plain brother of the poetic.  Diana
+said of him to Arthur: 'He does not supply me with similes; he points to
+the source of them.'  Arthur, with envy of the man of positive knowledge,
+disguised an unstrung heart in agreeing.
+
+Redworth alluded passingly to the condition of public affairs.  Neither
+of them replied.  Diana was wondering how one who perused the eternal of
+nature should lend a thought to the dusty temporary of the world.
+Subsequently she reflected that she was asking him to confine his great
+male appetite to the nibble of bread which nourished her immediate sense
+of life.  Her reflections were thin as mist, coming and going like the
+mist, with no direction upon her brain, if they sprang from it.  When he
+had gone, welcome though Arthur had seen him to be, she rebounded to a
+broader and cheerfuller liveliness.  Arthur was flattered by an idea of
+her casting off incubus--a most worthy gentleman, and a not perfectly
+sympathetic associate.  Her eyes had their lost light in them, her step
+was brisker; she challenged him to former games of conversation,
+excursions in blank verse here and there, as the mood dictated.  They
+amused themselves, and Emma too.  She revelled in seeing Tony's younger
+face and hearing some of her natural outbursts.  That Dacier never could
+have been the man for her, would have compressed and subjected her, and
+inflicted a further taste of bondage in marriage, she was assured.  She
+hoped for the day when Tony would know it, and haply that another, whom
+she little comprehended, was her rightful mate.
+
+March continued South-westerly and grew rainier, as Redworth had
+foretold, bidding them look for gales and storm, and then the change of
+wind.  It came, after wettings of a couple scorning the refuge of dainty
+townsfolk under umbrellas, and proud of their likeness to dripping
+wayside wildflowers.  Arthur stayed at Copsley for a week of the crisp
+North-easter; and what was it, when he had taken his leave, that brought
+Tony home from her solitary walk in dejection?  It could not be her
+seriously regretting the absence of the youthful companion she had parted
+with gaily, appointing a time for another meeting on the heights, and
+recommending him to repair idle hours with strenuous work.  The fit
+passed and was not explained.  The winds are sharp with memory.  The hard
+shrill wind crowed to her senses of an hour on the bleak sands of the
+French coast; the beginning of the curtained misery, inscribed as her
+happiness.  She was next day prepared for her term in London with Emma,
+who promised her to make an expedition at the end of it by way of
+holiday, to see The Crossways, which Mr. Redworth said was not tenanted.
+
+'You won't go through it like a captive?' said Emma.
+
+'I don't like it, dear,' Diana put up a comic mouth.  'The debts we owe
+ourselves are the hardest to pay.  That is the discovery of advancing
+age: and I used to imagine it was quite the other way.  But they are the
+debts of honour, imperative.  I shall go through it grandly, you will
+see.  If I am stopped at my first recreancy and turned directly the
+contrary way, I think I have courage.'
+
+'You will not fear to meet .  .  . any one?' said Emma.
+
+'The world and all it contains!  I am robust, eager for the fray, an
+Amazon, a brazen-faced hussy.  Fear and I have parted.  I shall not do
+you discredit.  Besides you intend to have me back here with you?  And
+besides again, I burn to make a last brave appearance.  I have not
+outraged the world, dear Emmy, whatever certain creatures in it may
+fancy.'
+
+She had come out of her dejectedness with a shrewder view of Dacier;
+equally painful, for it killed her romance, and changed the garden of
+their companionship in imagination to a waste.  Her clearing intellect
+prompted it, whilst her nature protested, and reviled her to uplift him.
+He had loved her.  'I shall die knowing that a man did love me once,' she
+said to her widowed heart, and set herself blushing and blanching.  But
+the thought grew inveterate: 'He could not bear much.'  And in her quick
+brain it shot up a crop of similitudes for the quality of that man's
+love.  She shuddered, as at a swift cleaving of cold steel.  He had not
+given her a chance; he had not replied to her letter written with the pen
+dipped in her heart's blood; he must have gone straight away to the woman
+he married.  This after almost justifying the scandalous world:--after
+.  .  .  She realized her sensations of that night when the house-door
+had closed on him; her feeling of lost sovereignty, degradation, feminine
+danger, friendliness: and she was unaware, and never knew, nor did the
+world ever know, what cunning had inspired the frosty Cupid to return to
+her and be warmed by striking a bargain for his weighty secret.  She knew
+too well that she was not of the snows which do not melt, however high
+her conceit of herself might place her.  Happily she now stood out of the
+sun, in a bracing temperature, Polar; and her compassion for women was
+deeply sisterly in tenderness and understanding.  She spoke of it to Emma
+as her gain.
+
+'I have not seen that you required to suffer to be considerate,' Emma
+said.
+
+'It is on my conscience that I neglected Mary Paynham, among others--and
+because you did not take to her, Emmy.'
+
+'The reading of it appears to me, that she has neglected you.'
+
+'She was not in my confidence, and so I construe it as delicacy.  One
+never loses by believing the best.'
+
+'If one is not duped.'
+
+'Expectations dupe us, not trust.  The light of every soul burns upward.
+Of course, most of them are candles in the wind.  Let us allow for
+atmospheric disturbance.  Now I thank you, dear, for bringing me back to
+life.  I see that I was really a selfish suicide, because I feel I have
+power to do some good, and belong to the army.  When we are beginning to
+reflect, as I do now, on a recovered basis of pure health, we have the
+world at the dawn and know we are young in it, with great riches, great
+things gained and greater to achieve.  Personally I behold a queer little
+wriggling worm for myself; but as one, of the active world I stand high
+and shapely; and the very thought of doing work, is like a draught of the
+desert-springs to me.  Instead of which, I have once more to go about
+presenting my face to vindicate my character.  Mr. Redworth would admit
+no irony in that!  At all events, it is anti-climax.'
+
+'I forgot to tell you, Tony, you have been proposed for,' said Emma; and
+there was a rush of savage colour over Tony's cheeks.
+
+Her apparent apprehensions were relieved by hearing the name of Mr.
+Sullivan Smith.
+
+'My poor dear countryman!  And he thought me worthy, did he?  Some day,
+when we are past his repeating it, I'll thank him.'
+
+The fact of her smiling happily at the narration of Sullivan Smith's
+absurd proposal by mediatrix, proved to Emma how much her nature thirsted
+for the smallest support in her self-esteem.
+
+The second campaign of London was of bad augury at the commencement,
+owing to the ridiculous intervention of a street-organ, that ground its
+pipes in a sprawling roar of one of the Puritani marches, just as the
+carriage was landing them at the door of her house.  The notes were
+harsh, dissonant, drunken, interlocked and horribly torn asunder,
+intolerable to ears not keen to extract the tune through dreadful
+memories.  Diana sat startled and paralyzed.  The melody crashed a
+revival of her days with Dacier, as in gibes; and yet it reached to her
+heart.  She imagined a Providence that was trying her on the threshold,
+striking at her feebleness.  She had to lock herself in her room for an
+hour of deadly abandonment to misery, resembling the run of poison
+through her blood, before she could bear to lift eyes on her friend; to
+whom subsequently she said: 'Emmy, there are wounds that cut sharp as the
+enchanter's sword, and we don't know we are in halves till some rough old
+intimate claps us on the back, merely to ask us how we are!  I have to
+join myself together again, as well as I can.  It's done, dear; but don't
+notice the cement.'
+
+'You will be brave,' Emma petitioned.
+
+'I long to show you I will.'
+
+The meeting with those who could guess a portion of her story, did not
+disconcert her.  To Lady Pennon and Lady Singleby, she was the brilliant
+Diana of her nominal luminary issuing from cloud.  Face and tongue, she
+was the same; and once in the stream, she soon gathered its current
+topics and scattered her arrowy phrases.  Lady Pennon ran about with
+them, declaring that the beautiful speaker, if ever down, was up, and up
+to her finest mark.  Mrs. Fryar-Gannett had then become the blazing
+regnant antisocial star; a distresser of domesticity, the magnetic
+attraction in the spirituous flames of that wild snapdragon bowl, called
+the Upper class; and she was angelically blonde, a straw-coloured Beauty.
+'A lovely wheat sheaf, if the head were ripe,' Diana said of her.
+
+'Threshed, says her fame, my dear,' Lady Pennon replied, otherwise
+allusive.
+
+'A wheatsheaf of contention for the bread of wind,' said Diana, thinking
+of foolish Sir Lukin; thoughtless of talking to a gossip.
+
+She would have shot a lighter dart, had she meant it to fly and fix.
+
+Proclaim, ye classics, what minor Goddess, or primal, Iris or Ate, sped
+straight away on wing to the empty wheatsheaf-ears of the golden-visaged
+Amabel Fryar-Gunnett, daughter of Demeter in the field to behold, of
+Aphrodite in her rosy incendiarism for the many of men; filling that
+pearly concave with a perversion of the uttered speech, such as never
+lady could have repeated, nor man, if less than a reaping harvester:
+which verily for women to hear, is to stamp a substantial damnatory
+verification upon the delivery of the saying:--
+
+'Mrs. Warwick says of you, that you're a bundle of straws for everybody
+and bread for nobody.'
+
+Or, stranger speculation, through what, and what number of conduits,
+curious, and variously colouring, did it reach the fair Amabel of the
+infant-in-cradle smile, in that deformation of the original utterance!
+To pursue the thing, would be to enter the subter-sensual perfumed
+caverns of a Romance of Fashionable Life, with no hope of coming back to
+light, other than by tail of lynx, like the great Arabian seaman, at the
+last page of the final chapter.  A prospectively popular narrative
+indeed! and coin to reward it, and applause.  But I am reminded that a
+story properly closed on the marriage of the heroine Constance and her
+young Minister of State, has no time for conjuring chemists' bouquet of
+aristocracy to lure the native taste.  When we have satisfied English
+sentiment, our task is done, in every branch of art, I hear: and it will
+account to posterity for the condition of the branches.  Those yet
+wakeful eccentrics interested in such a person as Diana, to the extent of
+remaining attentive till the curtain falls, demand of me to gather-up the
+threads concerning her: which my gardener sweeping his pile of dead
+leaves before the storm and night, advises me to do speedily.  But it
+happens that her resemblance to her sex and species of a civilized period
+plants the main threads in her bosom.  Rogues and a policeman, or a
+hurried change of front of all the actors, are not a part of our slow
+machinery.
+
+Nor is she to show herself to advantage.  Only those who read her woman's
+blood and character with the head, will care for Diana of the Crossways
+now that the knot of her history has been unravelled.  Some little love
+they must have for her likewise: and how it can be quickened on behalf of
+a woman who never sentimentalizes publicly, and has no dolly-dolly
+compliance, and muses on actual life, and fatigues with the exercise of
+brains, and is in sooth an alien: a princess of her kind and time, but a
+foreign one, speaking a language distinct from the mercantile,
+trafficking in ideas:--this is the problem.  For to be true to her, one
+cannot attempt at propitiation.  She said worse things of the world than
+that which was conveyed to the boxed ears of Mrs. Fryar-Gunnett.
+Accepting the war declared against her a second time, she performed the
+common mental trick in adversity of setting her personally known
+innocence to lessen her generally unknown error--but anticipating that
+this might become known, and the other not; and feeling that the motives
+of the acknowledged error had served to guard her from being the culprit
+of the charge she writhed under, she rushed out of a meditation
+compounded of mind and nerves, with derision of the world's notion of
+innocence and estimate of error.  It was a mood lasting through her stay
+in London, and longer, to the discomfort of one among her friends; and it
+was worthy of The Anti-climax Expedition, as she called it.
+
+For the rest, her demeanour to the old monster world exacting the
+servility of her, in repayment for its tolerating countenance, was
+faultless.  Emma beheld the introduction to Mrs. Warwick of his bride,
+by Mr. Percy Dacier.  She had watched their approach up the Ball-room,
+thinking, how differently would Redworth and Tony have looked.
+Differently, had it been Tony and Dacier: but Emma could not persuade
+herself of a possible harmony between them, save at the cost of Tony's
+expiation of the sin of the greater heart in a performance equivalent to
+Suttee.  Perfectly an English gentleman of the higher order, he seemed
+the effigy of a tombstone one, fixed upright, and civilly proud of his
+effigy bride.  So far, Emma considered them fitted.  She perceived his
+quick eye on her corner of the room; necessarily, for a man of his
+breeding, without a change of expression.  An emblem pertaining to her
+creed was on the heroine's neck; also dependant at her waist.  She was
+white from head to foot; a symbol of purity.  Her frail smile appeared
+deeply studied in purity.  Judging from her look and her reputation,
+Emma divined that the man was justly mated with a devious filmy
+sentimentalist, likely to 'fiddle harmonics on the sensual strings' for
+him at a mad rate in the years to come.  Such fiddling is indeed the
+peculiar diversion of the opulent of a fatly prosperous people; who take
+it, one may concede to them, for an inspired elimination of the higher
+notes of life: the very highest.  That saying of Tony's ripened with full
+significance to Emma now.  Not sensualism, but sham spiritualism, was the
+meaning; and however fine the notes, they come skilfully evoked of the
+under-brute in us.  Reasoning it so, she thought it a saying for the
+penetration of the most polished and deceptive of the later human masks.
+She had besides, be it owned, a triumph in conjuring a sentence of her
+friend's, like a sword's edge, to meet them; for she was boiling angrily
+at the ironical destiny which had given to those Two a beclouding of her
+beloved, whom she could have rebuked in turn for her insane caprice of
+passion.
+
+But when her beloved stood-up to greet Mrs. Percy Dacier, all idea save
+tremulous admiration of the valiant woman, who had been wounded nigh to
+death, passed from Emma's mind.  Diana tempered her queenliness to
+address the favoured lady with smiles and phrases of gentle warmth, of
+goodness of nature; and it became a halo rather than a personal eclipse
+that she cast.
+
+Emma looked at Dacier.  He wore the prescribed conventional air, subject
+in half a minute to a rapid blinking of the eyelids.  His wife could have
+been inimically imagined fascinated and dwindling.  A spot of colour came
+to her cheeks.  She likewise began to blink.
+
+The happy couple bowed, proceeding; and Emma had Dacier's back for a
+study.  We score on that flat slate of man, unattractive as it is to
+hostile observations, and unprotected, the device we choose.  Her
+harshest, was the positive thought that he had taken the woman best
+suited to him.  Doubtless, he was a man to prize the altar-candle
+above the lamp of day.  She fancied the back-view of him shrunken and
+straitened: perhaps a mere hostile fancy: though it was conceivable that
+he should desire as little of these meetings as possible.  Eclipses are
+not courted.
+
+The specially womanly exultation of Emma Dunstane in her friend's noble
+attitude, seeing how their sex had been struck to the dust for a trifling
+error, easily to be overlooked by a manful lover, and had asserted its
+dignity in physical and moral splendour, in self-mastery and benignness,
+was unshared by Diana.  As soon as the business of the expedition was
+over, her orders were issued for the sale of the lease of her house and
+all it contained.  'I would sell Danvers too,' she said, 'but the
+creature declines to be treated as merchandize.  It seems I have a
+faithful servant; very much like my life, not quite to my taste; the one
+thing out of the wreck!--with my dog!'
+
+Before quitting her house for the return to Copsley, she had to grant Mr.
+Alexander Hepburn, post-haste from his Caledonia, a private interview.
+She came out of it noticeably shattered.  Nothing was related to Emma,
+beyond the remark: 'I never knew till this morning the force of No in
+earnest.'  The weighty little word--woman's native watchdog and guardian,
+if she calls it to her aid in earnest--had encountered and withstood a
+fiery ancient host, astonished at its novel power of resistance.
+
+Emma contented herself with the result.  'Were you much supplicated?'
+
+'An Operatic Fourth-Act,' said Diana, by no means; feeling so flippantly
+as she spoke.
+
+She received, while under the impression of this man's, honest, if
+primitive, ardour of courtship, or effort to capture, a characteristic
+letter from Westlake, choicely phrased, containing presumeably an
+application for her hand, in the generous offer of his own.  Her reply to
+a pursuer of that sort was easy.  Comedy, after the barbaric attack,
+refreshed her wits and reliance on her natural fencing weapons.  To
+Westlake, the unwritten No was conveyed in a series of kindly ironic
+subterfuges, that, played it like an impish flea across the pages, just
+giving the bloom of the word; and rich smiles come to Emma's life in
+reading the dexterous composition: which, however, proved so thoroughly
+to Westlake's taste, that a second and a third exercise in the comedy of
+the negative had to be despatched to him from Copsley.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XL
+
+IN WHICH WE SEE NATURE MAKING OF A WOMAN A MAID AGAIN, AND A THRICE
+WHIMSICAL
+
+On their way from London, after leaving the station, the drive through
+the valley led them past a field, where cricketers were at work bowling
+and batting under a vertical sun: not a very comprehensible sight to
+ladies, whose practical tendencies, as observers of the other sex,
+incline them to question the gain of such an expenditure of energy.
+The dispersal of the alphabet over a printed page is not less perplexing
+to the illiterate.  As soon as Emma Dunstane discovered the Copsley head-
+gamekeeper at one wicket, and, actually, Thomas Redworth facing him, bat
+in hand, she sat up, greatly interested.  Sir Lukin stopped the carriage
+at the gate, and reminded his wife that it was the day of the year for
+the men of his estate to encounter a valley Eleven.  Redworth, like the
+good fellow he was, had come down by appointment in the morning out of
+London, to fill the number required, Copsley being weak this year.  Eight
+of their wickets had fallen for a lament able figure of twenty-nine runs;
+himself clean-bowled the first ball.  But Tom Redworth had got fast hold
+of his wicket, and already scored fifty to his bat.  'There! grand hit!'
+Sir Lukin cried, the ball flying hard at the rails.  'Once a cricketer,
+always a cricketer, if you've legs to fetch the runs.  And Pullen's not
+doing badly. His business is to stick.  We shall mark them a hundred
+yet.  I do hate a score on our side without the two 00's.'  He accounted
+for Redworth's mixed colours by telling the ladies he had lent him his
+flannel jacket; which, against black trousers, looked odd but not ill.
+
+Gradually the enthusiasm of the booth and bystanders converted the flying
+of a leather ball into a subject of honourable excitement.
+
+'And why are you doing nothing?' Sir Lukin was asked; and he explained:
+
+'My stumps are down: I'm married.'  He took his wife's hand prettily.
+
+Diana had a malicious prompting.  She smothered the wasp, and said:
+'Oh! look at that!'
+
+'Grand hit again!  Oh! good! good!' cried Sir Lukin, clapping to it,
+while the long-hit-off ran spinning his legs into one for an impossible
+catch; and the batsmen were running and stretching bats, and the ball
+flying away, flying back, and others after it, and still the batsmen
+running, till it seemed that the ball had escaped control and was leading
+the fielders on a coltish innings of its own, defiant of bowlers.
+
+Diana said merrily: 'Bravo our side!'
+
+'Bravo, old Tom Redworth'; rejoined Sir Lukin.  'Four, and a three!  And
+capital weather, haven't we: Hope we shall have same sort day next month
+--return match, my ground.  I've seen Tom Redworth score--old days--over
+two hundred t' his bat.  And he used to bowl too.  But bowling wants
+practice.  And, Emmy, look at the old fellows lining the booth, pipe in
+mouth and cheering.  They do enjoy a day like this.  We'll have a supper
+for fifty at Copsley's:--it's fun.  By Jove!  we must have reached up to
+near the hundred.'
+
+He commissioned a neighbouring boy to hie to the booth for the latest
+figures, and his emissary taught lightning a lesson.
+
+Diana praised the little fellow.
+
+'Yes, he's a real English boy,' said Emma.
+
+'We 've thousands of 'em, thousands, ready to your hand,' exclaimed Sir
+Lukin, 'and a confounded Radicalized country .  .  .'  he murmured
+gloomily of 'lets us be kicked!  .  .  .  any amount of insult, meek as
+gruel! . . . making of the finest army the world has ever seen!  You saw
+the papers this morning?  Good heaven!  how a nation with an atom of
+self-respect can go on standing that sort of bullying from foreigners!
+We do.  We're insulted and we're threatened, and we call for a hymn!--
+Now then, my man, what is it?'
+
+The boy had flown back.  'Ninety-two marked, sir; ninety-nine runs; one
+more for the hundred.'
+
+'Well reckoned; and mind you're up at Copsley for the return match.--
+And Tom Redworth says, they may bite their thumbs to the bone--they don't
+hurt us.  I tell him, he has no sense of national pride.  He says, we're
+not prepared for war: We never are!  And whose the fault?  Says, we're a
+peaceful people, but 'ware who touches us!  He doesn't feel a kick.--Oh!
+clever snick!  Hurrah for the hundred!--Two-three.  No, don't force the
+running, you fools!--though they 're wild with the ball: ha!--no?--all
+right!' The wicket stood.  Hurrah!
+
+The heat of the noonday sun compelled the ladies to drive on.
+
+'Enthusiasm has the privilege of not knowing monotony,' said Emma.  'He
+looks well in flannels.'
+
+'Yes, he does,' Diana replied, aware of the reddening despite her having
+spoken so simply.  'I think the chief advantage men have over us is in
+their amusements.'
+
+'Their recreations.'
+
+'That is the better word.'  Diana fanned her cheeks and said she was
+warm.  'I mean, the permanent advantage.  For you see that age does not
+affect them.'
+
+'Tom Redworth is not a patriarch, my dear.'
+
+'Well, he is what would be called mature.'
+
+'He can't be more than thirty-two or three; and that, for a man of his
+constitution, means youth.'
+
+'Well, I can imagine him a patriarch playing cricket.'
+
+'I should imagine you imagine the possible chances.  He is the father who
+would play with his boys.'
+
+'And lock up his girls in the nursery.'  Diana murmured of the
+extraordinary heat.
+
+Emma begged her to remember her heterodox views of the education for
+girls.
+
+'He bats admirably,' said Diana.  'I wish I could bat half as well.'
+
+'Your batting is with the tongue.'
+
+'Not so good.  And a solid bat, or bludgeon, to defend the poor stumps,
+is surer.  But there is the difference of cricket:--when your stumps are
+down, you are idle, at leisure; not a miserable prisoner.'
+
+'Supposing all marriages miserable.'
+
+'To the mind of me,' said Diana, and observed Emma's rather saddened
+eyelids for a proof that schemes to rob her of dear liberty were
+certainly planned.
+
+They conversed of expeditions to Redworth's Berkshire mansion, and to The
+Crossways, untenanted at the moment, as he had informed Emma, who fancied
+it would please Tony to pass a night in the house she loved; but as he
+was to be of the party she coldly acquiesced.
+
+The woman of flesh refuses pliancy when we want it of her, and will not,
+until it is her good pleasure, be bent to the development called a
+climax, as the puppet-woman, mother of Fiction and darling of the
+multitude! ever amiably does, at a hint of the Nuptial Chapter.  Diana in
+addition sustained the weight of brains.  Neither with waxen optics nor
+with subservient jointings did she go through her pathways of the world.
+Her direct individuality rejected the performance of simpleton, and her
+lively blood, the warmer for its containment quickened her to penetrate
+things and natures; and if as yet, in justness to the loyal male friend,
+she forbore to name him conspirator, she read both him and Emma, whose
+inner bosom was revealed to her, without an effort to see.  But her
+characteristic chasteness of mind, not coldness of the 'blood,--which had
+supported an arduous conflict, past all existing rights closely to
+depict, and which barbed her to pierce to the wishes threatening her
+freedom, deceived her now to think her flaming blushes came of her
+relentless divination on behalf of her recovered treasure: whereby the
+clear reading of others distracted the view of herself.  For one may be
+the cleverest alive, and still hoodwinked while blood is young and warm.
+
+The perpetuity of the contrast presented to her reflections, of
+Redworth's healthy, open, practical, cheering life, and her own
+freakishly interwinding, darkly penetrative, simulacrum of a life,
+cheerless as well as useless, forced her humiliated consciousness by
+degrees, in spite of pride, to the knowledge that she was engaged in a
+struggle with him; and that he was the stronger;--it might be, the
+worthier: she thought him the handsomer.  He throve to the light of day,
+and she spun a silly web that meshed her in her intricacies.  Her
+intuition of Emma's wishes led to this; he was constantly before her.
+She tried to laugh at the image of the concrete cricketer, half-
+flannelled, and red of face: the 'lucky calculator,' as she named him to
+Emma, who shook her head, and sighed.  The abstract, healthful and
+powerful man, able to play besides profitably working, defied those poor
+efforts.  Consequently, at once she sent up a bubble to the skies, where
+it became a spheral realm, of far too fine an atmosphere for men to
+breathe in it; and thither she transported herself at will, whenever the
+contrast, with its accompanying menace of a tyrannic subjugation,
+overshadowed her.  In the above, the kingdom composed of her shattered
+romance of life and her present aspirings, she was free and safe.
+Nothing touched her there--nothing that Redworth did.  She could not have
+admitted there her ideal of a hero.  It was the sublimation of a virgin's
+conception of life, better fortified against the enemy.  She peopled it
+with souls of the great and pure, gave it illimitable horizons, dreamy
+nooks, ravishing landscapes, melodies of the poets of music.  Higher and
+more-celestial than the Salvatore, it was likewise, now she could assure
+herself serenely, independent of the horrid blood-emotions.  Living up
+there, she had not a feeling.
+
+The natural result of this habit of ascending to a superlunary home,
+was the loss of an exact sense of how she was behaving below.  At the
+Berkshire mansion, she wore a supercilious air, almost as icy as she
+accused the place of being.  Emma knew she must have seen in the library
+a row of her literary ventures, exquisitely bound; but there was no
+allusion to the books.  Mary Paynham's portrait of Mrs. Warwick hung
+staring over the fireplace, and was criticized, as though its occupancy
+of that position had no significance.
+
+'He thinks she has a streak of genius,' Diana said to Emma.
+
+'It may be shown in time,' Emma replied, for a comment on the work.  'He
+should know, for the Spanish pictures are noble acquisitions.'
+
+'They are, doubtless, good investments.'
+
+He had been foolish enough to say, in Diana's hearing, that he considered
+the purchase of the Berkshire estate a good investment.  It had not yet a
+name.  She suggested various titles for Emma to propose: 'The Funds'; or
+'Capital Towers'; or 'Dividend Manor'; or 'Railholm'; blind to the
+evidence of inflicting pain.  Emma, from what she had guess concerning
+the purchaser of The Crossways, apprehended a discovery there which might
+make Tony's treatment of him unkinder, seeing that she appeared actuated
+contrariously; and only her invalid's new happiness in the small
+excursions she was capable of taking to a definite spot, of some homely
+attractiveness, moved her to follow her own proposal for the journey.
+Diana pleaded urgently, childishly in tone, to have Arthur Rhodes with
+them, 'so as to be sure of a sympathetic companion for a walk on the
+Downs.'  At The Crossways, they were soon aware that Mr. Redworth's
+domestics were in attendance to serve them.  Manifestly the house was his
+property, and not much of an investment!  The principal bed-room, her
+father's once, and her own, devoted now to Emma's use, appalled her with
+a resemblance to her London room.  She had noticed some of her furniture
+at 'Dividend Manor,' and chosen to consider it in the light of a bargain
+from a purchase at the sale of her goods.  Here was her bed, her writing-
+table, her chair of authorship, desks, books, ornaments, water-colour
+sketches.  And the drawing-room was fitted with her brackets and
+etageres, holding every knickknack she had possessed and scattered, small
+bronzes, antiques, ivory junks, quaint ivory figures Chinese and
+Japanese, bits of porcelain, silver incense-urns, dozens of dainty
+sundries.  She had a shamed curiosity to spy for an omission of one of
+them; all were there.  The Crossways had been turned into a trap.
+
+Her reply to this blunt wooing, conspired, she felt justifled in
+thinking, between him and Emma, was emphatic in muteness.  She treated it
+as if unobserved.  At night, in bed, the scene of his mission from Emma
+to her under this roof, barred her customary ascent to her planetary
+kingdom.  Next day she took Arthur after breakfast for a walk on the
+Downs and remained absent till ten minutes before the hour of dinner.
+As to that young gentleman, he was near to being caressed in public.
+Arthur's opinions, his good sayings, were quoted; his excellent
+companionship on really poetical walks, and perfect sympathy, praised to
+his face.  Challenged by her initiative to a kind of language that threw
+Redworth out, he declaimed: 'We pace with some who make young morning
+stale.'
+
+'Oh!  stale as peel of fruit long since consumed,' she chimed.
+
+And go they proceeded; and they laughed, Emma smiled a little, Redworth
+did the same beneath one of his questioning frowns--a sort of fatherly
+grimace.
+
+A suspicion that this man, when infatuated, was able to practise the
+absurdest benevolence, the burlesque of chivalry, as a man-admiring sex
+esteems it, stirred very naughty depths of the woman in Diana, labouring
+under her perverted mood.  She put him to proof, for the chance of arming
+her wickedest to despise him.  Arthur was petted, consulted, cited,
+flattered all round; all but caressed.  She played, with a reserve, the
+maturish young woman smitten by an adorable youth; and enjoyed doing it
+because she hoped for a visible effect--more paternal benevolence--and
+could do it so dispassionately.  Coquettry, Emma thought, was most
+unworthily shown; and it was of the worst description.  Innocent of
+conspiracy, she had seen the array of Tony's lost household treasures
+she wondered at a heartlessness that would not even utter common thanks
+to the friendly man for the compliment of prizing her portrait and the
+things she had owned; and there seemed an effort to wound him.
+
+The invalided woman, charitable with allowances for her erratic husband,
+could offer none for the woman of a long widowhood, that had become a
+trebly sensitive maidenhood; abashed by her knowledge of the world,
+animated by her abounding blood; cherishing her new freedom, dreading the
+menacer; feeling that though she held the citadel, she was daily less
+sure of its foundations, and that her hope of some last romance in life
+was going; for in him shone not a glimpse.  He appeared to Diana as a
+fatal power, attracting her without sympathy, benevolently overcoming:
+one of those good men, strong men, who subdue and do not kindle.  The
+enthralment revolted a nature capable of accepting subjection only by
+burning.  In return for his moral excellence, she gave him the moral
+sentiments: esteem, gratitude, abstract admiration, perfect faith.  But
+the man?  She could not now say she had never been loved; and a flood
+of tenderness rose in her bosom, swelling from springs that she had
+previously reproved with a desperate severity: the unhappy, unsatisfied
+yearning to be more than loved, to love.  It was alive, out of the wreck
+of its first trial.  This, the secret of her natural frailty, was bitter
+to her pride: chastely-minded as she was, it whelmed her.  And then her
+comic imagination pictured Redworth dramatically making love.  And to a
+widow!  It proved him to be senseless of romance.  Poetic men take aim at
+maidens.  His devotedness to a widow was charged against him by the
+widow's shudder at antecedents distasteful to her soul, a discolouration
+of her life.  She wished to look entirely forward, as upon a world washed
+clear of night, not to be cast back on her antecedents by practical
+wooings or words of love; to live spiritually; free of the shower at her
+eyelids attendant on any idea of her loving.  The woman who talked of the
+sentimentalist's 'fiddling harmonics,' herself stressed the material
+chords, in her attempt to escape out of herself and away from her
+pursuer.
+
+Meanwhile she was as little conscious of what she was doing as of how she
+appeared.  Arthur went about with the moony air of surcharged sweetness,
+and a speculation on it, alternately tiptoe and prostrate.  More of her
+intoxicating wine was administered to him, in utter thoughtlessness of
+consequences to one who was but a boy and a friend, almost of her own
+rearing.  She told Emma, when leaving The Crossways, that she had no
+desire to look on the place again: she wondered at Mr. Redworth's liking
+such a solitude.  In truth, the look back on it let her perceive that her
+husband haunted it, and disfigured the man, of real generosity, as her
+heart confessed, but whom she accused of a lack of prescient delicacy,
+for not knowing she would and must be haunted there.  Blaming him, her
+fountain of colour shot up, at a murmur of her unjustness and the poor
+man's hopes.
+
+A week later, the youth she publicly named 'her Arthur' came down to
+Copsley with news of his having been recommended by Mr. Redworth for the
+post of secretary to an old Whig nobleman famous for his patronage of men
+of letters.  And besides, he expected to inherit, he said, and gazed in a
+way to sharpen her instincts.  The wine he had drunk of late from her
+flowing vintage was in his eyes.  They were on their usual rambles out
+along the heights.  'Accept, by all means, and thank Mr. Redworth,' said
+she, speeding her tongue to intercept him.  'Literature is a good stick
+and a bad horse.  Indeed, I ought to know.  You can always write; I hope
+you will.'
+
+She stepped fast, hearing: 'Mrs. Warwick--Diana!  May I take your hand?'
+
+This was her pretty piece of work!  'Why should you?  If you speak my
+Christian name, no: you forfeit any pretext.  And pray, don't loiter.
+We are going at the pace of the firm of Potter and Dawdle, and you know
+they never got their shutters down till it was time to put them up
+again.'
+
+Nimble-footed as she was, she pressed ahead too fleetly for amorous
+eloquence to have a chance.  She heard 'Diana!' twice, through the
+rattling of her discourse and flapping of her dress.
+
+'Christian names are coin that seem to have an indifferent valuation of
+the property they claim,' she said in the Copsley garden; 'and as for
+hands, at meeting and parting, here is the friendliest you could have.
+Only don't look rueful.  My dear Arthur, spare me that, or I shall blame
+myself horribly.'
+
+His chance had gone, and he composed his face.  No hope in speaking had
+nerved him; merely the passion to speak.  Diana understood the state, and
+pitied the naturally modest young fellow, and chafed at herself as a
+senseless incendiary, who did mischief right and left, from seeking to
+shun the apparently inevitable.  A sidethought intruded, that he would
+have done his wooing poetically--not in the burly storm, or bull-Saxon,
+she apprehended.  Supposing it imperative with her to choose?  She looked
+up, and the bird of broader wing darkened the whole sky, bidding her know
+that she had no choice.
+
+Emma was requested to make Mr. Redworth acquainted with her story, all of
+it:--'So that this exalted friendship of his may be shaken to a common
+level.  He has an unbearably high estimate of me, and it hurts me.  Tell
+him all; and more than even you have known:--but for his coming to me,
+on the eve of your passing under the surgeon's hands, I should have gone
+--flung the world my glove!  A matter of minutes.  Ten minutes later!
+The train was to start for France at eight, and I was awaited.  I have to
+thank heaven that the man was one of those who can strike icily.  Tell
+Mr. Redworth what I say.  You two converse upon every subject.  One may
+be too loftily respected--in my case.  By and by--for he is a tolerant
+reader of life and women, I think--we shall be humdrum friends of the
+lasting order.'
+
+Emma's cheeks were as red as Diana's.  'I fancy Tom Redworth has not much
+to learn concerning any person he cares for,' she said.  'You like him?
+I have lost touch of you, my dear, and ask.'
+
+'I like him: that I can say.  He is everything I am not.  But now I am
+free, the sense of being undeservedly over-esteemed imposes fetters,
+and I don't like them.  I have been called a Beauty.  Rightly or other,
+I have had a Beauty's career; and a curious caged beast's life I have
+found it.  Will you promise me to speak to him?  And also, thank him for
+helping Arthur Rhodes to a situation.'
+
+At this, the tears fell from her.  And so enigmatical had she grown to
+Emma, that her bosom friend took them for a confessed attachment to the
+youth.
+
+Diana's wretched emotion shamed her from putting any inquiries whether
+Redworth had been told.  He came repeatedly, and showed no change of
+face, always continuing in the form of huge hovering griffin; until an
+idea, instead of the monster bird, struck her.  Might she not, after all,
+be cowering under imagination?  The very maidenly idea wakened her
+womanliness--to reproach her remainder of pride, not to see more
+accurately.  It was the reason why she resolved, against Emma's extreme
+entreaties, to take lodgings in the South valley below the heights, where
+she could be independent of fancies and perpetual visitors, but near her
+beloved at any summons of urgency; which Emma would not habitually send
+because of the coming of a particular gentleman.  Dresses were left at
+Copsley for dining and sleeping there upon occasion, and poor Danvers,
+despairing over the riddle of her mistress, was condemned to the
+melancholy descent.
+
+'It's my belief,' she confided to Lady Dunstane's maid Bartlett, 'she'll
+hate men all her life after that Mr. Dacier.'
+
+If women were deceived, and the riddle deceived herself, there is excuse
+for a plain man like Redworth in not having the slightest clue to the
+daily shifting feminine maze he beheld.  The strange thing was, that
+during her maiden time she had never been shifty or flighty, invariably
+limpid and direct.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLI
+
+CONTAINS A REVELATION OF THE ORIGIN OF THE TIGRESS IN DIANA
+
+An afternoon of high summer blazed over London through the City's awning
+of smoke, and the three classes of the population, relaxed by the
+weariful engagement with what to them was a fruitless heat, were
+severally bathing their ideas in dreams of the contrast possible to
+embrace: breezy seas or moors, aerial Alps, cool beer.  The latter, if
+confessedly the lower comfort, is the readier at command; and Thomas
+Redworth, whose perspiring frame was directing his inward vision to fly
+for solace to a trim new yacht, built on his lines, beckoning from
+Southampton Water, had some of the amusement proper to things plucked off
+the levels, in the conversation of a couple of journeymen close ahead of
+him, as he made his way from a quiet street of brokers' offices to a City
+Bank.  One asked the other if he had ever tried any of that cold stuff
+they were now selling out of barrows, with cream.  His companion
+answered, that he had not got much opinion of stuff of the sort; and what
+was it like?
+
+'Well, it's cheap, it ain't bad; it's cooling.  But it ain't refreshing.'
+
+'Just what I reckoned all that newfangle rubbish.'
+
+Without a consultation, the conservatives in beverage filed with a smart
+turn about, worthy of veterans at parade on the drill-ground, into a
+public-house; and a dialogue chiefly remarkable for absence of point,
+furnished matter to the politician's head of the hearer.  Provided that
+their beer was unadulterated!  Beer they would have; and why not, in
+weather like this?  But how to make the publican honest!  And he was not
+the only trickster preying on the multitudinous poor copper crowd,
+rightly to be protected by the silver and the golden.  Revelations of the
+arts practised to plump them with raw-earth and minerals in the guise of
+nourishment, had recently knocked at the door of the general conscience
+and obtained a civil reply from the footman.  Repulsive as the thought
+was to one still holding to Whiggish Liberalism, though flying various
+Radical kites, he was caught by the decisive ultratorrent, and whirled
+to amid the necessity for the interference of the State, to stop
+the poisoning of the poor.  Upper classes have never legislated
+systematically in their interests; and quid .  .  .  rabidae tradis ovile
+lupae?  says one of the multitude.  We may be seeing fangs of wolves
+where fleeces waxed.  The State that makes it a vital principle to
+concern itself with the helpless poor, meets instead of waiting for
+Democracy; which is a perilous flood but when it is dammed.  Or else, in
+course of time, luxurious yachting, my friend, will encounter other reefs
+and breakers than briny ocean's!  Capital, whereat Diana Warwick aimed
+her superbest sneer, has its instant duties.  She theorized on the side
+of poverty, and might do so: he had no right to be theorizing on the side
+of riches.  Across St. George's Channel, the cry for humanity in Capital
+was an agony.  He ought to be there, doing, not cogitating.  The post of
+Irish Secretary must be won by real service founded on absolute local
+knowledge.  Yes, and sympathy, if you like; but sympathy is for proving,
+not prating .  .  .  .
+
+These were the meditations of a man in love; veins, arteries, headpiece
+in love, and constantly brooding at a solitary height over the beautiful
+coveted object; only too bewildered by her multifarious evanescent
+feminine evasions, as of colours on a ruffle water, to think of pouncing
+for he could do nothing to soften, nothing that seemed to please her: and
+all the while, the motive of her mind impelled him in reflection beyond
+practicable limits: even pointing him to apt quotations!  Either he
+thought within her thoughts, or his own were at her disposal.  Nor was it
+sufficient for him to be sensible of her influence, to restrain the
+impetus he took from her.  He had already wedded her morally, and much
+that he did, as well as whatever he debated, came of Diana; more than if
+they had been coupled, when his downright practical good sense could have
+spoken.  She held him suspended, swaying him in that posture; and he was
+not a whit ashamed of it.  The beloved woman was throned on the very
+highest of the man.
+
+Furthermore, not being encouraged, he had his peculiar reason for delay,
+though now he could offer her wealth.  She had once in his hearing
+derided the unpleasant hiss of the ungainly English matron's title of
+Mrs. There was no harm in the accustomed title, to his taste; but she
+disliking it, he did the same, on her special behalf; and the prospect,
+funereally draped, of a title sweeter-sounding to her ears, was above his
+horizon.  Bear in mind, that he underwent the reverse of encouragement.
+Any small thing to please her was magnified, and the anticipation of it
+nerved the modest hopes of one who deemed himself and any man alive
+deeply her inferior.
+
+Such was the mood of the lover condemned to hear another malignant
+scandal defiling the name of the woman he worshipped.  Sir Lukin
+Dunstane, extremely hurried, bumped him on the lower step of the busy
+Bank, and said:
+
+'Pardon!' and 'Ha!  Redwarth!  making money?'
+
+'Why, what are you up to down here?' he was asked, and he answered:
+'Down to the Tower, to an officer quartered there.  Not bad quarters,
+but an infernal distance.  Business.'
+
+Having cloaked his expedition to the distance with the comprehensive
+word, he repeated it; by which he feared he had rendered it too
+significant, and he said: 'No, no; nothing particular'; and that caused
+the secret he contained to swell in his breast rebelliously, informing
+the candid creature of the fact of his hating to lie: whereupon thus he
+poured himself out, in the quieter bustle of an alley, off the main
+thoroughfare.  'You're a friend of hers.  I 'm sure you care for her
+reputation; you 're an old friend of hers, and she's my wife's dearest
+friend; and I'm fond of her too; and I ought to be, and ought to know,
+and do know:--pure?  Strike off my fist if there's a spot on her
+character!  And a scoundrel like that fellow Wroxeter!  Damnedest rage
+I ever was in!--Swears .  .  .  down at Lockton .  .  .  when she was a
+girl.  Why, Redworth, I can tell you, when Diana Warwick was a girl!'
+
+Redworth stopped him.  'Did he say it in your presence?'
+
+Sir Lukin was drawn-up by the harsh question.  'Well, no; not exactly.'
+He tried to hesitate, but he was in the hot vein of a confidence and he
+wanted advice.  'The cur said it to a woman--hang the woman!  And she
+hates Diana Warwick: I can't tell why--a regular snake's hate.  By Jove!
+how women carp hate!'
+
+'Who is the woman?' said Redworth.
+
+Sir Lukin complained of the mob at his elbows.  'I don't like mentioning
+names here.'
+
+A convenient open door of offices invited him to drag his receptacle, and
+possible counsellor, into the passage, where immediately he bethought him
+of a postponement of the distinct communication; but the vein was too
+hot.  'I say, Redworth, I wish you'd dine with me.  Let's drive up to my
+Club.--Very well, two words.  And I warn you, I shall call him out, and
+make it appear it 's about another woman, who'll like nothing so much, if
+I know the Jezebel.  Some women are hussies, let 'em be handsome as
+houris.  And she's a fire-ship; by heaven, she is!  Come, you're a friend
+of my wife's, but you're a man of the world and my friend, and you know
+how fellows are tempted, Tom Redworth.--Cur though he is, he's likely to
+step out and receive a lesson.--Well, he's the favoured cavalier for the
+present .  .  .  h'm .  .  .  Fryar-Gannett.  Swears he told her,
+circumstantially; and it was down at Lockton, when Diana Warwick was a
+girl.  Swears she'll spit her venom at her, so that Diana Warwick shan't
+hold her head up in London Society, what with that cur Wroxeter, Old
+Dannisburgh, and Dacier.  And it does count a list, doesn't it?  confound
+the handsome hag!  She's jealous of a dark rival.  I've been down to
+Colonel Hartswood at the Tower, and he thinks Wroxeter deserves
+horsewhipping, and we may manage it.  I know you 're dead against
+duelling; and so am I, on my honour.  But you see there are cases where
+a lady must be protected; and anything new, left to circulate against a
+lady who has been talked of twice--Oh, by Jove!  it must be stopped.  If
+she has a male friend on earth, it must be stopped on the spot.'
+
+Redworth eyed Sir Lukin curiously through his wrath.
+
+'We'll drive up to your Club,' he said.
+
+'Hartswood dines with me this evening, to confer,' rejoined Sir Lukin.
+'Will you meet him?'
+
+'I can't,' said Redworth, 'I have to see a lady, whose affairs I have
+been attending to in the City; and I 'm engaged for the evening.  You
+perceive, my good fellow,' he resumed, as they rolled along, 'this is a
+delicate business.  You have to consider your wife.  Mrs. Warwick's, name
+won't come up, but another woman's will.'
+
+'I meet Wroxeter at a gambling-house he frequents, and publicly call him
+cheat--slap his face, if need be.'
+
+'Sure to!' repeated Redworth.  'No stupid pretext will quash the woman's
+name.  Now, such a thing as a duel would give pain enough.'
+
+'Of course; I understand,' Sir Lukin nodded his clear comprehension.
+'But what is it you advise, to trounce the scoundrel, and silence him?'
+
+'Leave it to me for a day.  Let me have your word that you won't take a
+step: positively--neither you nor Colonel Hartswood.  I'll see you by
+appointment at your Club.'  Redworth looked up over the chimneys.
+'We 're going to have a storm and a gale, I can tell you.'
+
+'Gale and storm!' cried Sir Lukin; 'what has that got to do with it?'
+
+'Think of something else for, a time.'
+
+'And that brute of a woman--deuced handsome she is!--if you care for fair
+women, Redworth:--she's a Venus, jumped slap out of the waves, and the
+Devil for sire--that you learn: running about, sowing her lies.  She's a
+yellow witch.  Oh!  but she's a shameless minx.  And a black-leg cur like
+Wroxeter!  Any woman intimate with a fellow like that, stamps herself.
+I loathe her.  Sort of woman who swears in the morning you're the only
+man on earth; and next day--that evening-engaged!--fee to Polly Hopkins
+--and it's a gentleman, a nobleman, my lord!--been going on behind your
+back half the season!--and she isn't hissed when she abuses a lady, a
+saint in comparison!  You know the world, old fellow:--Brighton,
+Richmond, visits to a friend as deep in the bog.  How Fryar-Gunnett--
+a man, after all--can stand it!  And drives of an afternoon for an
+airing-by heaven!  You're out of that mess, Redworth: not much taste for
+the sex; and you're right, you're lucky.  Upon my word, the corruption of
+society in the present day is awful; it's appalling.--I rattled at her:
+and oh! dear me, perks on her hind heels and defies me to prove: and
+she's no pretender, but hopes she's as good as any of my "chaste Dianas."
+My dear old friend, it's when you come upon women of that kind you have a
+sickener.  And I'm bound by the best there is in a man-honour, gratitude,
+all the' list--to defend Diana Warwick.'
+
+'So, you see, for your wife's sake, your name can't be hung on a woman of
+that kind,' said Redworth.  'I'll call here the day after to-morrow at
+three P.M.'
+
+Sir Lukin descended and vainly pressed Redworth to run up into his Club
+for refreshment.  Said he roguishly:
+
+'Who 's the lady?'
+
+The tone threw Redworth on his frankness.
+
+'The lady I 've been doing business for in the City, is Miss Paynham.'
+
+'I saw her once at Copsley; good-looking.  Cleverish?'
+
+'She has ability.'
+
+Entering his Club, Sir Lukin was accosted in the reading-room by a
+cavalry officer, a Colonel Launay, an old Harrovian, who stood at the
+window and asked him whether it was not Tom Redworth in the cab.
+Another, of the same School, standing squared before a sheet of one of
+the evening newspapers, heard the name and joined them, saying: 'Tom
+Redworth is going to be married, some fellow told me.'
+
+'He'll make a deuced good husband to any woman--if it's true,' said Sir
+Lukin, with Miss Paynham ringing in his head.  'He's a cold-blooded old
+boy, and likes women for their intellects.'
+
+Colonel Launay hummed in meditative emphasis.  He stared at vacancy with
+a tranced eye, and turning a similar gaze on Sir Lukin, as if through
+him, burst out: 'Oh, by George, I say, what a hugging that woman 'll
+get!'
+
+The cocking of ears and queries of Sir Lukin put him to the test of his
+right to the remark; for it sounded of occult acquaintance with
+interesting subterranean facts; and there was a communication, in brief
+syllables and the dot language, crudely masculine.  Immensely surprised,
+Sir Lukin exclaimed: 'Of course!  when fellows live quietly and are
+careful of themselves.  Ah!  you may think you know a man for years, and
+you don't: you don't know more than an inch or two of him.  Why, of
+course, Tom Redworth would be uxorious--the very man!  And tell us what
+has become of the Firefly now?  One never sees her.  Didn't complain?'
+
+'Very much the contrary.'
+
+Both gentlemen were grave, believing their knowledge in the subterranean
+world of a wealthy city to give them a positive cognizance of female
+humanity; and the substance of Colonel Launay's communication had its
+impressiveness for them.
+
+'Well, it's a turn right-about-face for me,' said Sir Lukin.  'What a
+world we live in!  I fancy I've hit on the woman he means to marry;--had
+an idea of another woman once; but he's one of your friendly fellows with
+women.  That's how it was I took him for a fish.  Great mistake, I admit.
+But Tom Redworth 's a man of morals after all; and when those men do
+break loose for a plunge--ha!  Have you ever boxed with him?  Well, he
+keeps himself in training, I can tell you.'
+
+Sir Lukin's round of visits drew him at night to Lady Singleby's, where
+he sighted the identical young lady of his thoughts, Miss Paynham,
+temporarily a guest of the house; and he talked to her of Redworth,
+and had the satisfaction to spy a blush, a rageing blush: which avowal
+presented her to his view as an exceedingly good-looking girl; so that
+he began mentally to praise Redworth for a manly superiority to small
+trifles and the world's tattle.
+
+'You saw him to-day,' he said.
+
+She answered: 'Yes.  He goes down to Copsley tomorrow.'
+
+'I think not,' said Sir Lukin.'
+
+'I have it from him.'  She closed her eyelids in speaking.
+
+'He and I have some rather serious business in town.'
+
+'Serious?'
+
+'Don't be alarmed: not concerning him.'
+
+'Whom, then?  You have told me so much--I have a right to know.'
+
+'Not an atom of danger, I assure you?'
+
+'It concerns Mrs. Warwick!' said she.
+
+Sir Lukin thought the guess extraordinary.  He preserved an impenetrable
+air.  But he had spoken enough to set that giddy head spinning.
+
+Nowhere during the night was Mrs. Fryar-Gannett visible.  Earlier than
+usual, she was riding next day in the Row, alone for perhaps two minutes,
+and Sir Lukin passed her, formally saluting.  He could not help the look
+behind him, she sat so bewitchingly on horseback!  He looked, and behold,
+her riding-whip was raised erect from the elbow.  It was his horse that
+wheeled; compulsorily he was borne at a short canter to her side.
+
+'Your commands?'
+
+The handsome Amabel threw him a sombre glance from the corners of her
+uplifted eyelids; and snakish he felt it; but her colour and the line of
+her face went well with sullenness; and, her arts of fascination cast
+aside, she fascinated him more in seeming homelier, girlish.  If the
+trial of her beauty of a woman in a temper can bear the strain, she has
+attractive lures indeed; irresistible to the amorous idler: and when, in
+addition, being the guilty person, she plays the injured, her show of
+temper on the taking face pitches him into perplexity with his own
+emotions, creating a desire to strike and be stricken, howl and set
+howling, which is of the happiest augury for tender reconcilement,
+on the terms of the gentleman on his kneecap.
+
+'You've been doing a pretty thing!' she said, and briefly she named her
+house and half an hour, and flew.  Sir Lukin was left to admire the
+figure of the horsewoman.  Really, her figure had an air of vindicating
+her successfully, except for the poison she spat at Diana Warwick.  And
+what pretty thing had he been doing?  He reviewed dozens of speculations
+until the impossibility of seizing one determined him to go to Mrs.
+Fryar-Gunnett at the end of the half-hour--'Just to see what these women
+have to say for themselves.'
+
+Some big advance drops of Redworth's thunderstorm drawing gloomily
+overhead, warned him to be quick and get his horse into stables.
+Dismounted, the sensational man was irresolute, suspecting a female trap.
+But curiosity, combined with the instinctive turning of his nose in the
+direction of the lady's house, led him thither, to an accompaniment of
+celestial growls, which impressed him, judging by that naughty-girl face
+of hers and the woman's tongue she had, as a likely prelude to the scene
+to come below.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLII
+
+THE PENULTIMATE: SHOWING A FINAL STRUGGLE FOR LIBERTY AND RUN INTO
+HARNESS
+
+The prophet of the storm had forgotten his prediction; which, however,
+was of small concern to him, apart from the ducking he received midway
+between the valley and the heights of Copsley; whither he was bound,
+on a mission so serious that, according to his custom in such instances,
+he chose to take counsel of his active legs: an adviseable course when
+the brain wants clearing and the heart fortifying.  Diana's face was
+clearly before him through the deluge; now in ogle features, the dimple
+running from her mouth, the dark bright eyes and cut of eyelids, and
+nostrils alive under their lightning; now inkier whole radiant smile, or
+musefully listening, nursing a thought.  Or she was obscured, and he felt
+the face.  The individuality of it had him by the heart, beyond his
+powers of visioning.  On his arrival, he stood in the hall, adrip like
+one of the trees of the lawn, laughing at Lady Dunstane's anxious
+exclamations.  His portmanteau had come and he was expected; she hurried
+out at the first ringing of the bell, to greet and reproach him for
+walking in such weather.
+
+'Diana has left me,' she said, when he reappeared in dry clothing.
+'We are neighbours; she has taken cottage-lodgings at Selshall, about an
+hour's walk:--one of her wild dreams of independence.  Are you
+disappointed?'
+
+'I am,' Redworth confessed.
+
+Emma coloured.  'She requires an immense deal of humouring at present.
+The fit will wear off; only we must wait for it.  Any menace to her
+precious liberty makes her prickly.  She is passing the day with the
+Pettigrews, who have taken a place near her village for a month.  She
+promised to dine and sleep here, if she returned in time.  What is your
+news?'
+
+'Nothing; the world wags on.'
+
+'You have nothing special to tell her?'
+
+'Nothing'; he hummed; 'nothing, I fancy, that she does not know.'
+
+'You said you were disappointed.'
+
+'It's always a pleasure to see her.'
+
+'Even in her worst moods, I find it so.'
+
+'Oh! moods!' quoth Redworth.
+
+'My friend, they are to be reckoned, with women.'
+
+'Certainly; what I meant was, that I don't count them against women.'
+
+'Good: but my meaning was .  .  .  I think I remember your once comparing
+them and the weather; and you spoke of the "one point more variable in
+women."  You may forestall your storms.  There is no calculating the
+effect of a few little words at a wrong season.'
+
+'With women!  I suppose not.  I have no pretension to a knowledge of the
+sex.'
+
+Emma imagined she had spoken plainly enough, if he had immediate designs;
+and she was not sure of that, and wished rather to shun his confidences
+while Tony was in her young widowhood, revelling in her joy of liberty.
+By and by, was her thought: perhaps next year.  She dreaded Tony's
+refusal of the yoke, and her iron-hardness to the dearest of men
+proposing it; and moreover, her further to be apprehended holding to the
+refusal, for the sake of consistency, if it was once uttered.  For her
+own sake, she shrank from hearing intentions, that distressing the good
+man, she would have to discountenance.  His candour in confessing
+disappointment, and his open face, his excellent sense too, gave her some
+assurance of his not being foolishly impetuous.  After he had read to her
+for an hour, as his habit was on evenings and wet days, their discussion
+of this and that in the book lulled any doubts she had of his prudence,
+enough to render it even a dubious point whether she might be speculating
+upon a wealthy bachelor in the old-fashioned ultra-feminine manner; the
+which she so abhorred that she rejected the idea.  Consequently,
+Redworth's proposal to walk down to the valley for Diana, and bring her
+back, struck her as natural when a shaft of western sunshine from a
+whitened edge of raincloud struck her windows.  She let him go without an
+intimated monition or a thought of one; thinking simply that her Tony
+would be more likely to come, having him for escort.  Those are silly
+women who are always imagining designs and intrigues and future
+palpitations in the commonest actions of either sex.  Emma Dunstane
+leaned to the contrast between herself and them.
+
+Danvers was at the house about sunset, reporting her mistress to be
+on her way, with Mr. Redworth.  The maid's tale of the dreadful state of
+the lanes, accounted for their tardiness; and besides the sunset had been
+magnificent.  Diana knocked at Emma's bedroom door, to say, outside,
+hurriedly in passing, how splendid the sunset had been, and beg for an
+extra five minutes.  Taking full fifteen, she swam into the drawing-room,
+lively with kisses on Emma's cheeks, and excuses, referring her
+misconduct in being late to the seductions of 'Sol' in his glory.
+Redworth said he had rarely seen so wonderful a sunset.  The result of
+their unanimity stirred Emma's bosom to match-making regrets; and the
+walk of the pair together, alone under the propitious laming heavens,
+appeared to her now as an opportunity lost.  From sisterly sympathy, she
+fancied she could understand Tony's liberty-loving reluctance: she had no
+comprehension of the backwardness of the man beholding the dear woman
+handsomer than in her maiden or her married time: and sprightlier as
+well.  She chatted deliciously, and drew Redworth to talk his best on his
+choicer subjects, playing over them like a fide-wisp, determined at once
+to flounder him and to make him shine.  Her tender esteem for the man was
+transparent through it all; and Emma, whose evening had gone happily
+between them, said to her, in their privacy, before parting: 'You seemed
+to have been inspired by "Sol," my dear.  You do like him, don't you?'
+
+Diana vowed she adored him; and with a face of laughter in rosy
+suffusion, put Sol for Redworth, Redworth for Sol; but, watchful of
+Emma's visage, said finally: 'If you mean the mortal man, I think him up
+to almost all your hyperboles--as far as men go; and he departed to his
+night's rest, which I hope will be good, like a king.  Not to admire him,
+would argue me senseless, heartless.  I do; I have reason to.'
+
+'And you make him the butt of your ridicule, Tony.'
+
+'No; I said "like a king"; and he is one.  He has, to me, morally the
+grandeur of your Sol sinking, Caesar stabbed, Cato on the sword-point.
+He is Roman, Spartan, Imperial; English, if you like, the pick, of the
+land.  It is an honour to call him friend, and I do trust he will choose
+the pick among us, to make her a happy woman--if she's for running in
+harness.  There, I can't say more.'
+
+Emma had to be satisfied with it, for the present.
+
+They were astonished at breakfast by seeing Sir Lukin ride past the
+windows.  He entered with the veritable appetite of a cavalier who had
+ridden from London fasting; and why he had come at that early hour, he
+was too hungry to explain.  The ladies retired to read their letters by
+the morning's post; whereupon Sir Lukin called to Redworth; 'I met that
+woman in the park yesterday, and had to stand a volley.  I went beating
+about London for you all the afternoon and evening.  She swears you rated
+her like a scullery wench, and threatened to ruin Wroxeter.  Did you see
+him?  She says, the story's true in one particular, that he did snatch a
+kiss, and got mauled.  Not so much to pay for it!  But what a ruffian--
+eh?'
+
+'I saw him,' said Redworth.  'He 's one of the new set of noblemen who
+take bribes to serve as baits for transactions in the City.  They help to
+the ruin of their order, or are signs of its decay.  We won't judge it by
+him.  He favoured me with his "word of honour" that the thing you heard
+was entirely a misstatement, and so forth:--apologized, I suppose.  He
+mumbled something.'
+
+'A thorough cur!'
+
+'He professed his readiness to fight, if either of us was not contented.'
+
+'He spoke to the wrong man.  I've half a mind to ride back and have him
+out for that rascal "osculation" and the lady unwilling!--and she a young
+one, a girl, under the protection of the house!  By Jove!  Redworth, when
+you come to consider the scoundrels men can be, it stirs a fellow's bile.
+There's a deal of that sort of villany going--and succeeding sometimes!
+He deserves the whip or a bullet.'
+
+'A sermon from Lukin Dunstane might punish him.'
+
+'Oh!  I'm a sinner, I know.  But, go and tell one woman of another woman,
+and that a lie!  That's beyond me.'
+
+'The gradations of the deeps are perhaps measurable to those who are in
+them.'
+
+'The sermon's at me--pop!' said Sir Lukin.  'By the way, I'm coming round
+to think Diana Warwick was right when she used to jibe at me for throwing
+up my commission.  Idleness is the devil--or mother of him.  I manage my
+estates; but the truth is, it doesn't occupy my mind.'
+
+'Your time.'
+
+'My mind, I say.'
+
+'Whichever you please.'
+
+'You're crusty to-day, Redworth.  Let me tell you, I think--and hard too,
+when the fit's on me.  However, you did right in stopping--I'll own--a
+piece of folly, and shutting the mouths of those two; though it caused me
+to come in for a regular drencher.  But a pretty woman in a right-down
+termagant passion is good theatre; because it can't last, at that pace;
+and you're sure of your agreeable tableau.  Not that I trust her ten
+minutes out of sight--or any woman, except one or two; my wife and Diana
+Warwick.  Trust those you've tried, old boy.  Diana Warwick ought to be
+taught to thank you; though I don't know how it's to be done.'
+
+'The fact of it is,' Redworth frowned and rose, 'I've done mischief.
+I had no right to mix myself in it.  I'm seldom caught off my feet by
+an impulse; but I was.  I took the fever from you.'
+
+He squared his figure at the window, and looked up on a driving sky.
+
+'Come, let's play open cards, Tom Redworth,' said Sir Lukin, leaving the
+table and joining his friend by the window.  'You moral men are doomed to
+be marrying men, always; and quite right.  Not that one doesn't hear a
+roundabout thing or two about you: no harm.  Very much the contrary:--
+as the world goes.  But you're the man to marry a wife; and if I guess
+the lady, she's a sensible girl and won't be jealous.  I 'd swear she
+only waits for asking.'
+
+'Then you don't guess the lady,' said Redworth.
+
+'Mary Paynham?'
+
+The desperate half-laugh greeting the name convinced more than a dozen
+denials.
+
+Sir Lukin kept edging round for a full view of the friend who shunned
+inspection.  'But is it?  .  .  .  can it be?  it must be, after all!
+.  .  .  why, of course it is!  But the thing staring us in the face is
+just what we never see.  Just the husband for her!--and she's the wife!
+Why, Diana Warwick 's the very woman, of course!  I remember I used to
+think so before she was free to wed.'
+
+'She is not of that opinion.'  Redworth blew a heavy breath; and it
+should be chronicled as a sigh; but it was hugely masculine.
+
+'Because you didn't attack, the moment she was free; that 's what upset
+my calculations,' the sagacious gentleman continued, for a vindication of
+his acuteness: then seizing the reply: 'Refuses? you don't mean to say
+you're the man to take a refusal?  and from a green widow in the blush?
+Did you see her cheeks when she was peeping at the letter in her hand?
+She colours at half a word--takes the lift of a finger for Hymen coming.
+And lots of fellows are after her; I know it from Emmy.  But you're not
+the man to be refused.  You're her friend--her champion.  That woman
+Fryar-Gunnett would have it you were the favoured lover, and sneered at
+my talk of old friendship.  Women are always down dead on the facts;
+can't put them off a scent!'
+
+'There's the mischief!'  Redworth blew again.  'I had no right to be
+championing Mrs. Warwick's name.  Or the world won't give it, at all
+events.  I'm a blundering donkey.  Yes, she wishes to keep her liberty.
+And, upon my soul, I'm in love with everything she wishes! I've got the
+habit.'
+
+'Habit be hanged!' cried Sir Lukin.  'You're in love with the woman.
+I know a little more of you now, Mr. Tom.  You're a fellow in earnest
+about what you do.  You're feeling it now, on the rack, by heaven!
+though you keep a bold face.  Did she speak positively?--sort of feminine
+of "you're the monster, not the man"?  or measured little doctor's dose
+of pity?--worse sign.'  You 're not going?'
+
+'If you'll drive me down in half an hour,' said Redworth.
+
+'Give me an hour,' Sir Lukin replied, and went straight to his wife's
+blue-room.
+
+Diana was roused from a meditation on a letter she held, by the entrance
+of Emma in her bed-chamber, to whom she said: 'I have here the very
+craziest bit of writing!--but what is disturbing you, dear?'
+
+Emma sat beside her, panting and composing her lips to speak.  'Do you,
+love me?  I throw policy to the winds, if only, I can batter at you for
+your heart and find it!  Tony, do you love me?  But don't answer: give me
+your hand.  You have rejected him!'
+
+'He has told you?'
+
+'No.  He is not the man to cry out for a wound.  He heard in London--
+Lukin has had the courage to tell me, after his fashion:--Tom Redworth
+heard an old story, coming from one of the baser kind of women: grossly
+false, he knew.  I mention only Lord Wroxeter and Lockton.  He went to
+man and woman both, and had it refuted, and stopped their tongues, on
+peril; as he of all men is able to do when he wills it.'
+
+Observing the quick change in Tony's eyes, Emma exclaimed: 'How you
+looked disdain when you asked whether he had told me!  But why are you
+the handsome tigress to him, of all men living!  The dear fellow, dear
+to me at least! since the day he first saw you, has worshipped you and
+striven to serve you:--and harder than any Scriptural service to have the
+beloved woman to wife.  I know nothing to compare with it, for he is a
+man of warmth.  He is one of those rare men of honour who can command
+their passion; who venerate when they love: and those are the men that
+women select for punishment!  Yes, you!  It is to the woman he loves that
+he cannot show himself as he is, because he is at her feet.  You have
+managed to stamp your spirit on him; and as a consequence, he defends
+you now, for flinging him off.  And now his chief regret is, that he has
+caused his name to be coupled with yours.  I suppose he had some poor
+hope, seeing you free.  Or else the impulse to protect the woman of his
+heart and soul was too strong.  I have seen what he suffered, years back,
+at the news of your engagement.'
+
+'Oh, for God's sake, don't,' cried Tony, tears running over, and her
+dream of freedom, her visions of romance, drowning.
+
+'It was like the snapping of the branch of an oak, when the trunk stands
+firm,' Emma resumed, in her desire to scourge as well as to soften.  'But
+similes applied to him will strike you as incongruous.'  Tony swayed her
+body, for a negative, very girlishly and consciously.  'He probably did
+not woo you in a poetic style, or the courtly by prescription.'  Again
+Tony swayed; she had to hug herself under the stripes, and felt as if
+alone at sea, with her dear heavens pelting.  'You have sneered at him
+for his calculating--to his face: and it was when he was comparatively
+poor that he calculated--to his cost! that he dared not ask you to marry
+a man who could not offer you a tithe of what he considered fit for the
+peerless woman.  Peerless, I admit.  There he was not wrong.  But if he
+had valued you half a grain less, he might have won you.  You talk much
+of chivalry; you conceive a superhuman ideal, to which you fit a very
+indifferent wooden model, while the man of all the world the most
+chivalrous!  .  .  .  He is a man quite other from what you think him:
+anything but a "Cuthbert Dering" or a "Man of Two Minds."  He was in the
+drawing-room below, on the day I received your last maiden letter from
+The Crossways--now his property, in the hope of making it yours.'
+
+'I behaved abominably there!' interposed Tony, with a gasp.
+
+'Let it pass.  At any rate, that was the prick of a needle, not the blow
+of a sword.'
+
+'But marriage, dear Emmy!  marriage!  Is marriage to be the end of me?'
+
+'What amazing apotheosis have you in prospect?  And are you steering so
+particularly well by yourself?'
+
+'Miserably!  But I can dream.  And the thought of a husband cuts me from
+any dreaming.  It's all dead flat earth at once!'
+
+'Would, you lave rejected him when you were a girl?'
+
+'I think so.'
+
+'The superior merits of another .  .  .?'
+
+'Oh, no, no, no, no!  I might have accepted him: and I might not have
+made him happy.  I wanted a hero, and the jewelled garb and the feather
+did not suit him.'
+
+'No; he is not that description of lay-figure.  You have dressed it, and
+gemmed it, and--made your discovery.  Here is a true man; and if you can
+find me any of your heroes to match him, I will thank you.  He came on
+the day I speak of, to consult me as to whether, with the income he then
+had .  .  .  Well, I had to tell him you were engaged.  The man has never
+wavered in his love of you since that day.  He has had to bear
+something.'
+
+This was an electrical bolt into Tony's bosom, shaking her from self-pity
+and shame to remorseful pity of the suffering lover; and the tears ran in
+streams, as she said:
+
+'He bore it, Emmy, he bore it.'  She sobbed out: 'And he went on building
+a fortune and batting!  Whatever he undertakes he does perfectly-approve
+of the pattern or not.  Oh!  I have no doubt he had his nest of wish
+piping to him all the while: only it seems quaint, dear, quaint, and
+against everything we've been reading of lovers!  Love was his bread and
+butter!'  Her dark eyes showered.  'And to tell you what you do not know
+of him, his way of making love is really,' she sobbed, 'pretty.  It . . .
+it took me by surprise; I was expecting a bellow and an assault of horns;
+and if, dear:--you will say, what boarding-school girl have you got with
+you!  and I feel myself getting childish:--if Sol in his glory had not
+been so m .  .  .  majestically m .  .  .  magnificent, nor seemed to
+show me the king .  .  .  kingdom of my dreams, I might have stammered
+the opposite word to the one he heard.  Last night, when he took my hand
+kindly before going to bed I had a fit for dropping on my knees to him.
+I saw him bleed, and he held himself right royally.  I told you he did;
+--Sol in his moral grandeur!  How infinitely above the physical monarch--
+is he not, Emmy?  What one dislikes, is the devotion of all that grandeur
+to win a widow.  It should be a maiden princess.  You feel it so, I am
+sure.  And here am I, as if a maiden princess were I, demanding romantic
+accessories of rubious vapour in the man condescending to implore the
+widow to wed him.  But, tell me, does he know everything of his widow--
+everything?  I shall not have to go through the frightful chapter?'
+
+'He is a man with his eyes awake; he knows as much as any husband could
+require to know,' said Emma; adding: 'My darling!  he trusts you.  It is
+the soul of the man that loves you, as it is mine.  You will not tease
+him?  Promise me.  Give yourself frankly.  You see it clearly before
+you.'
+
+'I see compulsion, my dear.  What I see, is a regiment of Proverbs,
+bearing placards instead of guns, and each one a taunt at women,
+especially at widows.  They march; they form square; they enclose me in
+the middle, and I have their inscriptions to digest.  Read that crazy
+letter from Mary Paynham while I am putting on my bonnet.  I perceive I
+have been crying like a raw creature in her teens.  I don't know myself.
+An advantage of the darker complexions is our speedier concealment of the
+traces.'
+
+Emma read Miss Paynham's letter, and returned it with the comment:
+'Utterly crazy.'  Tony said: 'Is it not?  I am to "Pause before I trifle
+with a noble heart too long."  She is to "have her happiness in the
+constant prayer for ours";  and she is "warned by one of those
+intimations never failing her, that he runs a serious danger."  It reads
+like a Wizard's Almanack.  And here "Homogeneity of sentiment the most
+perfect, is unable to contend with the fatal charm, which exercised by an
+indifferent person, must be ascribed to original predestination."  She
+should be under the wing of Lady Wathin. There is the mother for such
+chicks!  But I'll own to you, Emmy, that after the perusal, I did ask
+myself a question as to my likeness of late to the writer.  I have
+drivelled .  .  .  I was shuddering over it when you came in.  I have
+sentimentalized up to thin smoke.  And she tells a truth when she says I
+am not to "count social cleverness"--she means volubility--" as a warrant
+for domineering a capacious intelligence": because of the gentleman's
+modesty.  Agreed: I have done it; I am contrite.  I am going into slavery
+to make amends for presumption.  Banality, thy name is marriage!'
+
+'Your business is to accept life as we have it,' said Emma; and Tony
+shrugged.  She was precipitate in going forth to her commonplace fate,
+and scarcely looked at the man requested by Emma to escort her to her
+cottage.  After their departure, Emma fell into laughter at the last
+words with the kiss of her cheeks: 'Here goes old Ireland!' But, from her
+look and from what she had said upstairs, Emma could believe that the
+singular sprite of girlishness invading and governing her latterly, had
+yielded place to the woman she loved.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLIII
+
+NUPTIAL CHAPTER; AND OF HOW A BARELY WILLING WOMAN WAS LED TO BLOOM WITH
+THE NUPTIAL SENTIMENT
+
+Emma watched them on their way through the park, till they rounded the
+beechwood, talking, it could be surmised, of ordinary matters; the face
+of the gentleman turning at times to his companion's, which steadily
+fronted the gale.  She left the ensuing to a prayer for their good
+direction, with a chuckle at Tony's evident feeling of a ludicrous
+posture, and the desperate rush of her agile limbs to have it over.
+But her prayer throbbed almost to a supplication that the wrong done
+to her beloved by Dacier--the wound to her own sisterly pride rankling as
+an injury to her sex, might be cancelled through the union of the woman
+noble in the sight of God with a more manlike man.
+
+Meanwhile the feet of the couple were going faster than their heads to
+the end of the journey.  Diana knew she would have to hoist the signal-
+and how?  The prospect was dumb-foundering.  She had to think of
+appeasing her Emma.  Redworth, for his part; actually supposed she had
+accepted his escorting in proof of the plain friendship offered him
+overnight.
+
+'What do your "birds" do in weather like this?' she said.
+
+'Cling to their perches and wait patiently.  It's the bad time with them
+when you don't hear them chirp.'
+
+'Of course you foretold the gale.'
+
+'Oh, well, it did not require a shepherd or a skipper for that.'
+
+'Your grand gift will be useful to a yachtsman.'
+
+'You like yachting.  When I have tried my new schooner in the Channel,
+she is at your command for as long as you and Lady Dunstane please.'
+
+'So you acknowledge that birds--things of nature--have their bad time?'
+
+'They profit ultimately by the deluge and the wreck.  Nothing on earth is
+"tucked-up" in perpetuity.'
+
+'Except the dead.  But why should the schooner be at our command?'
+
+'I shall be in Ireland.'
+
+He could not have said sweeter to her ears or more touching.
+
+'We shall hardly feel safe without the weatherwise on board.'
+
+'You may count on my man Barnes; I have proved him.  He is up to his work
+even when he's bilious: only, in that case, occurring about once a
+fortnight, you must leave him to fight it out with the elements.'
+
+'I rather like men of action to have a temper.'
+
+'I can't say much for a bilious temper.'
+
+The weather to-day really seemed of that kind, she remarked.  He
+assented, in the shrug manner--not to dissent: she might say what she
+would.  He helped nowhere to a lead; and so quick are the changes of mood
+at such moments that she was now far from him under the failure of an
+effort to come near.  But thoughts of Emma pressed.
+
+'The name of the new schooner?  Her name is her picture to me.'
+
+'I wanted you to christen her.'
+
+'Launched without a name?'
+
+'I took a liberty.'
+
+Needless to ask, but she did.  'With whom?'
+
+'I named her Diana.'
+
+'May the Goddess of the silver bow and crescent protect her!  To me the
+name is ominous of mischance.'
+
+'I would commit my fortunes and life .  .  .  !'  He checked his tongue,
+ejaculating: 'Omens!'
+
+She had veered straight away from her romantic aspirations to the blunt
+extreme of thinking that a widow should be wooed in unornamented matter-
+of-fact, as she is wedded, with a 'wilt thou,' and 'I will,' and no
+decorative illusions.  Downright, for the unpoetic creature, if you
+please!  So she rejected the accompaniment of the silver Goddess and high
+seas for an introduction of the crisis.
+
+'This would be a thunderer on our coasts.  I had a trial of my sailing
+powers in the Mediterranean.'
+
+As she said it, her musings on him then, with the contract of her
+position toward him now, fierily brushed her cheeks; and she wished him
+the man to make one snatch at her poor lost small butterfly bit of
+freedom, so that she might suddenly feel in haven, at peace with her
+expectant Emma.  He could have seen the inviting consciousness, but he
+was absurdly watchful lest the flying sprays of border trees should
+strike her.  He mentioned his fear, and it became an excuse for her
+seeking protection of her veil.  'It is our natural guardian,' she said.
+
+'Not much against timber,' said he.
+
+The worthy creature's anxiety was of the pattern of cavaliers escorting
+dames--an exaggeration of honest zeal; a present example of clownish
+goodness, it might seem; until entering the larch and firwood along the
+beaten heights, there was a rocking and straining of the shallow-rooted
+trees in a tremendous gust that quite pardoned him for curving his arm in
+a hoop about her and holding a shoulder in front.  The veil did her
+positive service.
+
+He was honourably scrupulous not to presume.  A right good unimpulsive
+gentleman: the same that she had always taken him for and liked.
+
+'These firs are not taproots,' he observed, by way of apology.
+
+Her dress volumed and her ribands rattled and chirruped on the verge of
+the slope.  'I will take your arm here,' she said.
+
+Redworth received the little hand, saying: 'Lean to me.'
+
+They descended upon great surges of wind piping and driving every light
+surface-atom as foam; and they blinked and shook; even the man was
+shaken.  But their arms were interlinked and they grappled; the battering
+enemy made them one.  It might mean nothing, or everything: to him it
+meant the sheer blissful instant.
+
+At the foot of the hill, he said: 'It's harder to keep to, the terms of
+yesterday.'
+
+'What were they?' said she, and took his breath more than the fury of the
+storm had done.
+
+'Raise the veil, I beg.'
+
+'Widows do not wear it.'
+
+The look revealed to him was a fugitive of the wilds, no longer the
+glittering shooter of arrows.
+
+'Have you . . .?'  changed to me, was the signification understood.
+'Can you?--for life'.  Do you think you can?'
+
+His poverty in the pleading language melted her.
+
+'What I cannot do, my best of friends, is to submit to be seated on a
+throne, with you petitioning.  Yes, as far as concerns this hand of mine,
+if you hold it worthy of you.  We will speak of that.  Now tell me the
+name of the weed trailing along the hedge there!
+
+He knew it well; a common hedgerow weed; but the placid diversion baffled
+him.  It was clematis, he said.
+
+'It drags in the dust when it has no firm arm to cling to.  I passed it
+beside you yesterday with a flaunting mind and not a suspicion of a
+likeness.  How foolish I was!  I could volubly sermonize; only it should
+be a young maid to listen.  Forgive me the yesterday.'
+
+'You have never to ask.  You withdraw your hand--was I rough?'
+
+'No,' she smiled demurely; 'it must get used to the shackles: but my
+cottage is in sight.  I have a growing love for the place.  We will enter
+it like plain people--if you think of coming in.'
+
+As she said it she had a slight shock of cowering under eyes tolerably
+hawkish in their male glitter; but her coolness was not disturbed; and
+without any apprehensions she reflected on what has been written of the
+silly division and war of the sexes:--which two might surely enter on an
+engagement to live together amiably, unvexed by that barbarous old fowl
+and falcon interlude.  Cool herself, she imagined the same of him, having
+good grounds for the delusion; so they passed through the cottage-garden
+and beneath the low porchway, into her little sitting-room, where she was
+proceeding to speak composedly of her preference for cottages, while
+untying her bonnet-strings:--'If I had begun my life in a cottage!'--when
+really a big storm-wave caught her from shore and whirled her to mid-sea,
+out of every sensibility but the swimming one of her loss of self in the
+man.
+
+'You would not have been here!' was all he said.  She was up at his
+heart, fast-locked, undergoing a change greater than the sea works; her
+thoughts one blush, her brain a fire-fount.  This was not like being
+seated on a throne.
+
+'There,' said he, loosening his hug, 'now you belong to me!  I know you
+from head to foot.  After that, my darling, I could leave you for years,
+and call you wife, and be sure of you.  I could swear it for you--my life
+on it!  That 's what I think of you.  Don't wonder that I took my chance
+--the first:--I have waited!'
+
+Truer word was never uttered, she owned, coming into some harmony with
+man's kiss on her mouth: the man violently metamorphozed to a stranger,
+acting on rights she had given him.  And who was she to dream of denying
+them?  Not an idea in her head!  Bound verily to be thankful for such
+love, on hearing that it dated from the night in Ireland .  .  .  .
+'So in love with you that, on my soul, your happiness was my marrow--
+whatever you wished; anything you chose.  It's reckoned a fool's part.
+No, it's love: the love of a woman--the one woman!  I was like the hand
+of a clock to the springs.  I taught this old watch-dog of a heart to
+keep guard and bury the bones you tossed him.'
+
+'Ignorantly, admit,' said she, and could have bitten her tongue for the
+empty words that provoked: 'Would you have flung him nothing?' and caused
+a lowering of her eyelids and shamed glimpses of recollections.  'I hear
+you have again been defending me.  I told you, I think, I wished I had
+begun my girl's life in a cottage.  All that I have had to endure!  .  .
+or so it seems to me: it may be my way of excusing myself:--I know my
+cunning in that peculiar art.  I would take my chance of mixing among the
+highest and the brightest.'
+
+'Naturally.'
+
+'Culpably.'
+
+'It brings you to me.'
+
+'Through a muddy channel.'
+
+'Your husband has full faith in you, my own.'
+
+'The faith has to be summoned and is buffeted, as we were just now on the
+hill.  I wish he had taken me from a cottage.'
+
+'You pushed for the best society, like a fish to its native sea.'
+
+'Pray say, a salmon to the riverheads.'
+
+'Better,' Redworth laughed joyfully, between admiration of the tongue
+that always outflew him, and of the face he reddened.
+
+By degrees her apter and neater terms of speech helped her to a notion of
+regaining some steps of her sunken ascendancy, under the weight of the
+novel masculine pressure on her throbbing blood; and when he bent to her
+to take her lord's farewell of her, after agreeing to go and delight Emma
+with a message, her submission and her personal pride were not so much at
+variance: perhaps because her buzzing head had no ideas.  'Tell Emma you
+have undertaken to wash the blackamoor as white as she can be,' she said
+perversely, in her spite at herself for not coming, as it were, out of
+the dawn to the man she could consent to wed: and he replied: 'I shall
+tell her my dark girl pleads for a fortnight's grace before she and I set
+sail for the West coast of Ireland': conjuring a picture that checked any
+protest against the shortness of time:--and Emma would surely be his
+ally.
+
+They talked of the Dublin Ball: painfully to some of her thoughts.
+But Redworth kissed that distant brilliant night as freshly as if no
+belabouring years rolled in the chasm: which led her to conceive partly,
+and wonderingly, the nature of a strong man's passion; and it subjugated
+the woman knowing of a contrast.  The smart of the blow dealt her by him
+who had fired the passion in her became a burning regret for the loss of
+that fair fame she had sacrificed to him, and could not bring to her
+truer lover: though it was but the outer view of herself--the world's
+view; only she was generous and of honest conscience, and but for the
+sake of her truer lover, she would mentally have allowed the world to
+lash and abuse her, without a plea of material purity.  Could it be
+named?  The naming of it in her clear mind lessened it to accidental:--
+By good fortune, she was no worse!--She said to Redworth, when finally
+dismissing him; 'I bring no real disgrace to you, my friend.'--To have
+had this sharp spiritual battle at such a time, was proof of honest
+conscience, rarer among women, as the world has fashioned them yet, than
+the purity demanded of them.--His answer: 'You are my wife!' rang in her
+hearing.
+
+When she sat alone at last, she was incapable, despite her nature's
+imaginative leap to brightness, of choosing any single period, auspicious
+or luminous or flattering, since the hour of her first meeting this man,
+rather than the grey light he cast on her, promising helpfulness, and
+inspiring a belief in her capacity to help.  Not the Salvatore high
+raptures nor the nights of social applause could appear preferable: she
+strained her shattered wits to try them.  As for her superlunary sphere,
+it was in fragments; and she mused on the singularity, considering that
+she was not deeply enamoured.  Was she so at all?  The question drove her
+to embrace the dignity of being reasonable--under Emmy's guidance.  For
+she did not stand firmly alone; her story confessed it.  Marriage might
+be the archway to the road of good service, even as our passage through
+the flesh may lead to the better state.  She had thoughts of the kind,
+and had them while encouraging herself to deplore the adieu to her little
+musk-scented sitting-room, where a modest freedom breathed, and her
+individuality had seemed pointing to a straighter growth.
+
+She nodded subsequently to the truth of her happy Emma's remark: 'You
+were created for the world, Tony.'  A woman of blood and imagination in
+the warring world, without a mate whom she can revere, subscribes to a
+likeness with those independent minor realms between greedy mighty
+neighbours, which conspire and undermine when they do not openly threaten
+to devour.  So, then, this union, the return to the wedding yoke,
+received sanction of grey-toned reason.  She was not enamoured she could
+say it to herself.  She had, however, been surprised, both by the man and
+her unprotesting submission; surprised and warmed, unaccountably warmed.
+Clearness of mind in the woman chaste by nature, however little ignorant
+it allowed her to be in the general review of herself, could not compass
+the immediately personal, with its acknowledgement of her subserviency to
+touch and pressure--and more, stranger, her readiness to kindle.  She
+left it unexplained.  Unconsciously the image of Dacier was effaced.
+Looking backward, her heart was moved to her long-constant lover with
+most pitying tender wonderment--stormy man, as her threatened senses told
+her that he was.  Looking at him, she had to mask her being abashed and
+mastered.  And looking forward, her soul fell in prayer for this true
+man's never repenting of his choice.  Sure of her now, Mr. Thomas
+Redworth had returned to the station of the courtier, and her feminine
+sovereignty was not ruffled to make her feel too feminine.  Another
+revelation was his playful talk when they were more closely intimate.
+He had his humour as well as his hearty relish of hers.
+
+'If all Englishmen were like him!' she chimed with Emma Dunstane's
+eulogies, under the influence.
+
+'My dear,' the latter replied, 'we should simply march over the Four
+Quarters and be blessed by the nations!  Only, avoid your trick of
+dashing headlong to the other extreme.  He has his faults.'
+
+'Tell me of them,' Diana cooed for an answer.  'Do.  I want the flavour.
+A girl would be satisfied with superhuman excellence.  A widow asks for
+feature.'
+
+'To my thinking, the case is, that if it is a widow who sees the
+superhuman excellence in a man, she may be very well contented to cross
+the bridge with him,' rejoined Emma.  .  .  .
+
+'Suppose the bridge to break, and for her to fall into the water, he
+rescuing her--then perhaps!'
+
+'But it has been happening!'
+
+'But piecemeal, in extension, so slowly.  I go to him a derelict, bearing
+a story of the sea; empty of ideas.  I remember sailing out of harbour
+passably well freighted for commerce.'
+
+'When Tom Redworth has had command of the "derelict" a week, I should
+like to see her!'
+
+The mention of that positive captaincy drowned Diana in morning colours.
+She was dominated, physically and morally, submissively too.  What she
+craved, in the absence of the public whiteness which could have caused
+her to rejoice in herself as a noble gift, was the spring of enthusiasm.
+Emma touched a quivering chord of pride with her hint at the good augury,
+and foreshadowing of the larger Union, in the Irishwoman's bestowal of
+her hand on the open-minded Englishman she had learned to trust.  The
+aureole glimmered transiently: she could neither think highly of the
+woman about to be wedded, nor poetically of the man; nor, therefore,
+rosily of the ceremony, nor other than vacuously of life.  And yet, as
+she avowed to Emma, she had gathered the three rarest good things of
+life: a faithful friend, a faithful lover, a faithful servant: the two
+latter exposing an unimagined quality of emotion.  Danvers, on the night
+of the great day for Redworth, had undressed her with trembling fingers,
+and her mistress was led to the knowledge that the maid had always been
+all eye; and on reflection to admit that it came of a sympathy she did
+not share.
+
+But when Celtic brains are reflective on their emotional vessel they
+shoot direct as the arrow of logic.  Diana's glance at the years behind
+lighted every moving figure to a shrewd transparency, herself among them.
+She was driven to the conclusion that the granting of any of her heart's
+wild wishes in those days would have lowered her--or frozen.  Dacier was
+a coldly luminous image; still a tolling name; no longer conceivably her
+mate.  Recollection rocked, not she.  The politician and citizen was
+admired: she read the man;--more to her own discredit than to his, but
+she read him, and if that is done by the one of two lovers who was true
+to love, it is the God of the passion pronouncing a final release from
+the shadow of his chains.
+
+Three days antecedent to her marriage, she went down the hill over her
+cottage chimneys with Redworth, after hearing him praise and cite to Emma
+Dunstane sentences of a morning's report of a speech delivered by Dacier
+to his constituents.  She alluded to it, that she might air her power of
+speaking of the man coolly to him, or else for the sake of stirring
+afresh some sentiment he had roused; and he repeated his high opinion of
+the orator's political wisdom: whereby was revived in her memory a
+certain reprehensible view, belonging to her period of mock-girlish
+naughtiness--too vile!--as to his paternal benevolence, now to clear
+vision the loftiest manliness.  What did she do?  She was Irish;
+therefore intuitively decorous in amatory challenges and interchanges.
+But she was an impulsive woman, and foliage was thick around, only a few
+small birds and heaven seeing; and penitence and admiration sprang the
+impulse.  It had to be this or a burst of weeping:--she put a kiss upon
+his arm.
+
+She had omitted to think that she was dealing with a lover a man of
+smothered fire, who would be electrically alive to the act through a
+coat-sleeve.  Redworth had his impulse.  He kept it under,--she felt the
+big breath he drew in.  Imagination began busily building a nest for him,
+and enthusiasm was not sluggish to make a home of it.  The impulse of
+each had wedded; in expression and repression; her sensibility told her
+of the stronger.
+
+She rose on the morning of her marriage day with his favourite Planxty
+Kelly at her lips, a natural bubble of the notes.  Emma drove down to the
+cottage to breakfast and superintend her bride's adornment, as to which,
+Diana had spoken slightingly; as well as of the ceremony, and the
+institution, and this life itself:--she would be married out of her
+cottage, a widow, a cottager, a woman under a cloud; yes, a sober person
+taking at last a right practical step, to please her two best friends.
+The change was marked.  She wished to hide it, wished to confide it.
+Emma was asked: 'How is he this morning?' and at the answer, describing
+his fresh and spirited looks, and his kind ways with Arthur Rhodes, and
+his fun with Sullivan Smith, and the satisfaction with the bridegroom
+declared by Lord Larrian (invalided from his Rock and unexpectingly
+informed of the wedding), Diana forgot that she had kissed her, and this
+time pressed her lips, in a manner to convey the secret bridally.
+
+'He has a lovely day.'
+
+'And bride,' said Emma.
+
+'If you two think so!  I should like to agree with my dear old lord and
+bless him for the prize he takes, though it feels itself at present
+rather like a Christmas bon-bon--a piece of sugar in the wrap of a rhymed
+motto.  He is kind to Arthur, you say?'
+
+'Like a cordial elder brother.'
+
+'Dear love, I have it at heart that I was harsh upon Mary Paynham for her
+letter.  She meant well--and I fear she suffers.  And it may have been a
+bit my fault.  Blind that I was!  When you say "cordial elder brother,"
+you make him appear beautiful to me.  The worst of that is, one becomes
+aware of the inability to match him.'
+
+'Read with his eyes when you meet him this morning, my Tony.'
+
+The secret was being clearly perceived by Emma, whose pride in assisting
+to dress the beautiful creature for her marriage--with the man of men had
+a tinge from the hymenaeal brand, exulting over Dacier, and in the
+compensation coming to her beloved for her first luckless footing on this
+road.
+
+'How does he go down to the church?' said Diana.
+
+'He walks down.  Lukin and his Chief drive.  He walks, with your Arthur
+and Mr. Sullivan Smith.  He is on his way now.'
+
+Diana looked through the window in the direction of the hill.  'That is
+so like him, to walk to his wedding!'
+
+Emma took the place of Danvers in the office of the robing, for the maid,
+as her mistress managed to hint, was too steeped 'in the colour of the
+occasion' to be exactly tasteful, and had the art, no doubt through
+sympathy, of charging permissible common words with explosive meanings:--
+she was in an amorous palpitation, of the reflected state.  After several
+knockings and enterings of the bedchamber-door, she came hurriedly to
+say: 'And your pillow, ma'am?  I had almost forgotten it!'  A question
+that caused her mistress to drop the gaze of a moan on Emma, with
+patience trembling.  Diana preferred a hard pillow, and usually carried
+her own about.  'Take it,' she had to reply.
+
+The friends embraced before descending to step into the fateful carriage.
+'And tell me,' Emma said, 'are not your views of life brighter to-day?'
+
+'Too dazzled to know!  It may be a lamp close to the eyes or a radiance
+of sun.  I hope they are.'
+
+'You are beginning to think hopefully again?'
+
+'Who can really think, and not think hopefully?  You were in my mind last
+night, and you brought a little boat to sail me past despondency of life
+and the fear of extinction.  When we despair or discolour things, it is
+our senses in revolt, and they have made the sovereign brain their
+drudge.  I heard you whisper; with your very breath in my ear: "There is
+nothing the body suffers that the soul may not profit by."  That is
+Emma's history.  With that I sail into the dark; it is my promise of the
+immortal: teaches me to see immortality for us.  It comes from you, my
+Emmy.'
+
+If not a great saying, it was in the heart of deep thoughts: proof to
+Emma that her Tony's mind had resumed its old clear high-aiming activity;
+therefore that her nature was working sanely, and that she accepted her
+happiness, and bore love for a dower to her husband.  No blushing
+confession of the woman's love of the man would have told her so much as
+the return to mental harmony with the laws of life shown in her darling's
+pellucid little sentence.
+
+She revolved it long after the day of the wedding.  To Emma, constantly
+on the dark decline of the unillumined verge, between the two worlds,
+those words were a radiance and a nourishment.  Had they waned she would
+have trimmed them to feed her during her soul-sister's absence.  They
+shone to her of their vitality.  She was lying along her sofa, facing her
+South-western window, one afternoon of late November, expecting Tony from
+her lengthened honeymoon trip, while a sunset in the van of frost, not
+without celestial musical reminders of Tony's husband, began to deepen;
+and as her friend was coming, she mused on the scenes of her friend's
+departure, and how Tony, issuing from her cottage porch had betrayed her
+feelings in the language of her sex by stooping to lift above her head
+and kiss the smallest of her landlady's children ranged up the garden-
+path to bid her farewell over their strewing of flowers;--and of her
+murmur to Tony, entering the churchyard, among the grave-mounds: 'Old
+Ireland won't repent it!' and Tony's rejoinder, at the sight of the
+bridegroom advancing, beaming: 'A singular transformation of Old
+England!'--and how, having numberless ready sources of laughter and tears
+down the run of their heart-in-heart intimacy, all spouting up for a word
+in the happy tremour of the moment, they had both bitten their lips and
+blinked on a moisture of the eyelids.  Now the dear woman was really
+wedded, wedded and mated.  Her letters breathed, in their own lively or
+thoughtful flow, of the perfect mating.  Emma gazed into the depths of
+the waves of crimson, where brilliancy of colour came out of central
+heaven preternaturally near on earth, till one shade less brilliant
+seemed an ebbing away to boundless remoteness.  Angelical and mortal
+mixed, making the glory overhead a sign of the close union of our human
+conditions with the ethereal and psychically divined.  Thence it grew
+that one thought in her breast became a desire for such extension of days
+as would give her the blessedness to clasp in her lap--if those kind
+heavens would grant it!--a child of the marriage of the two noblest of
+human souls, one the dearest; and so have proof at heart that her country
+and our earth are fruitful in the good, for a glowing future.  She was
+deeply a woman, dumbly a poet.  True poets and true women have the native
+sense of the divineness of what the world deems gross material substance.
+Emma's exaltation in fervour had not subsided when she held her beloved
+in her arms under the dusk of the withdrawing redness.  They sat
+embraced, with hands locked, in the unlighted room, and Tony spoke of the
+splendid sky.  'You watched it knowing I was on my way to you?'
+
+'Praying, dear.'
+
+'For me?'
+
+'That I might live long enough to be a godmother.'
+
+There was no reply: there was an involuntary little twitch of Tony's
+fingers.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+Accidents are the specific for averting the maladies of age
+Accounting for it, is not the same as excusing
+Assist in our small sphere; not come mouthing to the footlights
+Avoid the position that enforces publishing
+Capacity for thinking should precede the act of writing
+Chaste are wattled in formalism and throned in sourness
+Could the best of men be simply--a woman's friend?
+Enthusiasm has the privilege of not knowing monotony
+Envy of the man of positive knowledge
+Expectations dupe us, not trust
+Externally soft and polished, internally hard and relentless
+Fiddle harmonics on the sensual strings
+Heart to keep guard and bury the bones you tossed him
+Holding to the refusal, for the sake of consistency
+I don't count them against women (moods)
+I never knew till this morning the force of No in earnest
+I wanted a hero
+I'm in love with everything she wishes! I've got the habit
+If he had valued you half a grain less, he might have won you
+Infatuated men argue likewise, and scandal does not move them
+It is the devil's masterstroke to get us to accuse him
+Let never Necessity draw the bow of our weakness
+Literature is a good stick and a bad horse
+Material good reverses its benefits the more nearly we clasp it
+Mistake of the world is to think happiness possible to the sense
+Nothing is a secret that has been spoken
+Nothing the body suffers that the soul may not profit by
+Now far from him under the failure of an effort to come near
+Our weakness is the swiftest dog to hunt us
+Question the gain of such an expenditure of energy
+Rare men of honour who can command their passion
+Read with his eyes when you meet him this morning
+Sham spiritualism
+She had sunk her intelligence in her sensations
+Sympathy is for proving, not prating
+The debts we owe ourselves are the hardest to pay
+Trial of her beauty of a woman in a temper
+We don't know we are in halves
+We're a peaceful people, but 'ware who touches us
+Weighty little word--woman's native watchdog and guardian (No!)
+When we despair or discolour things, it is our senses in revolt
+Who can really think, and not think hopefully?
+Who venerate when they love
+With that I sail into the dark
+Women with brains, moreover, are all heartless
+
+
+
+
+[The End]
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 4469 ***
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Diana of the Crossways, v5,
+by George Meredith
+#75 in our series by George Meredith
+
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+
+Title: Diana of the Crossways, v5
+
+Author: George Meredith
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+Release Date: September, 2003 [Etext #4469]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on February 12, 2002]
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Diana of the Crossways, v5, by Meredith
+*********This file should be named 4469.txt or 4469.zip*********
+
+This etext was produced by David Widger <widger@cecomet.net>
+
+Project Gutenberg Etexts are often created from several printed
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+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we usually do not
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+
+The "legal small print" and other information about this book
+may now be found at the end of this file.  Please read this
+important information, as it gives you specific rights and
+tells you about restrictions in how the file may be used.
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+[NOTE: There is a short list of bookmarks, or pointers, at the end of the
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+
+
+
+
+
+DIANA OF THE CROSSWAYS
+
+By George Meredith
+
+1897
+
+
+
+BOOK 5.
+
+XXXVI.    IS CONCLUSIVE AS TO THE HEARTLESSNESS OF WOMEN WITH BRAINS
+XXXVII.   AN EXHIBITION OF SOME CHAMPIONS OF THE STRICKEN LADY
+XXXVIII.  CONVALESCENCE OF A HEALTHY MIND DISTRAUGHT
+XXXIX.    OF NATURE WITH ONE OF HER CULTIVATED DAUGHTERS AND A SHORT
+          EXCURSION IN ANTI-CLIMAX
+XL.       IN WHICH WE SEE NATURE MAKING OF A WOMAN A MAID AGAIN, AND A
+          THRICE WHIMSICAL
+XLI.      CONTAINS A REVELATION OF THE ORIGIN OF THE TIGRESS IN DIANA
+XLII.     THE PENULTIMATE : SHOWING A FINAL STRUGGLE FOR LIBERTY AND RUN
+          INTO HARNESS
+XLIII.    NUPTIAL CHAPTER: AND OF HOW A BARELY WILLING WOMAN WAS LED TO
+          BLOOM WITH NUPTIAL SENTIMENT
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVI
+
+IS CONCLUSIVE AS TO THE HEARTLESSNESS OF WOMEN WITH BRAINS
+
+Hymenaeal rumours are those which might be backed to run a victorious
+race with the tale of evil fortune; and clearly for the reason that man's
+livelier half is ever alert to speed them.  They travel with an
+astonishing celerity over the land, like flames of the dry beacon-faggots
+of old time in announcement of the invader or a conquest, gathering as
+they go: wherein, to say nothing of their vastly wider range, they
+surpass the electric wires.  Man's nuptial half is kindlingly concerned
+in the launch of a new couple; it is the business of the fair sex: and
+man himself (very strangely, but nature quickens him still) lends a not
+unfavouring eye to the preparations of the matrimonial vessel for its
+oily descent into the tides, where billows will soon be rising, captain
+and mate soon discussing the fateful question of who is commander.  We
+consent, it appears, to hope again for mankind; here is another chance!
+Or else, assuming the happiness of the pair, that pomp of ceremonial,
+contrasted with the little wind-blown candle they carry between them,
+catches at our weaker fibres.
+
+After so many ships have foundered, some keel up, like poisoned fish, at
+the first drink of water, it is a gallant spectacle, let us avow; and
+either the world perpetuating it is heroical or nature incorrigible in
+the species.  Marriages are unceasing.  Friends do it, and enemies; the
+unknown contractors of this engagement, or armistice, inspire an
+interest.  It certainly is both exciting and comforting to hear that man
+and woman are ready to join in a mutual affirmative, say Yes together
+again.  It sounds like the end of the war.
+
+The proclamation of the proximate marriage of a young Minister of State
+and the greatest heiress of her day; notoriously 'The young Minister of
+State' of a famous book written by the beautiful, now writhing, woman
+madly enamoured of him--and the heiress whose dowry could purchase a
+Duchy; this was a note to make the gossips of England leap from their
+beds at the midnight hour and wag tongues in the market-place.  It did
+away with the political hubbub over the Tonans article, and let it noise
+abroad like nonsense.  The Hon. Percy Dacier espouses Miss Asper; and she
+rescues him from the snares of a siren, he her from the toils of the
+Papists.  She would have gone over to them, she was going when, luckily
+for the Protestant Faith, Percy Dacier intervened with his proposal.
+Town and country buzzed the news; and while that dreary League trumpeted
+about the business of the nation, a people suddenly become Oriental
+chattered of nothing but the blissful union to be celebrated in princely
+state, with every musical accessory, short of Operatic.
+
+Lady Wathin was an active agent in this excitement.  The excellent woman
+enjoyed marriages of High Life: which, as there is presumably wealth to
+support them, are manifestly under sanction: and a marriage that she
+could consider one of her own contrivance, had a delicate flavour of a
+marriage in the family; not quite equal to the seeing a dear daughter of
+her numerous progeny conducted to the altar, but excelling it in the pomp
+that bids the heavens open.  She and no other spread the tidings of Miss
+Asper's debating upon the step to Rome at the very instant of Percy
+Dacier's declaration of his love; and it was a beautiful struggle, that
+of the half-dedicated nun and her deep-rooted earthly passion, love
+prevailing!  She sent word to Lady Dunstane: 'You know the interest I
+have always taken in dear Constance Aspen' etc.; inviting her to come on
+a visit a week before the end of the month, that she might join in the
+ceremony of a wedding 'likely to be the grandest of our time.'  Pitiful
+though it was, to think of the bridal pair having but eight or ten days
+at the outside, for a honeymoon, the beauty of their 'mutual devotion to
+duty' was urged by Lady Wathin upon all hearers.
+
+Lady Dunstane declined the invitation.  She waited to hear from her
+friend, and the days went by; she could only sorrow for her poor Tony,
+divining her state.  However little of wrong in the circumstances, they
+imposed a silence on her decent mind, and no conceivable shape of writing
+would transmit condolences.  She waited, with a dull heartache: by no
+means grieving at Dacier's engagement to the heiress; until Redworth
+animated her, as the bearer of rather startling intelligence, indirectly
+relating to the soul she loved.  An accident in the street had befallen
+Mr. Warwick.  Redworth wanted to know whether Diana should be told of it,
+though he had no particulars to give; and somewhat to his disappointment,
+Lady Dunstane said she would write.  She delayed, thinking the accident
+might not be serious; and the information of it to Diana surely would be
+so.  Next day at noon her visitor was Lady Wathin, evidently perturbed
+and anxious to say more than she dared: but she received no assistance.
+After beating the air in every direction, especially dwelling on the fond
+reciprocal affection of the two devoted lovers, to be united within three
+days' time, Lady Wathin said at last: 'And is it not shocking!  I talk of
+a marriage and am appalled by a death.  That poor man died last night in
+the hospital.  I mean poor Mr. Warwick.  He was recovering, getting
+strong and well, and he was knocked down at a street-crossing and died
+last night.  It is a warning to us!'
+
+'Mr. Redworth happened to hear of it at his Club, near which the accident
+occurred, and he called at the hospital.  Mr. Warwick was then alive,'
+said Lady Dunstane; adding: 'Well, if prevention is better than cure, as
+we hear!  Accidents are the specific for averting the maladies of age,
+which are a certain crop!'
+
+Lady Wathin's eyelids worked and her lips shut fast at the cold-hearted
+remark void of meaning.
+
+She sighed.  'So ends a life of misery, my dear!'
+
+'You are compassionate.'
+
+'I hope so.  But .  .  .  Indeed I must speak, if you will let me.  I
+think of the living.'
+
+Lady Dunstane widened her eyes.  'Of Mrs. Warwick?'
+
+'She has now the freedom she desired.  I think of others.  Forgive me,
+but Constance Asper is to me as a daughter.  I have perhaps no grounds
+for any apprehension.  Love so ardent, so sincere, was never shown by
+bridegroom elect: and it is not extraordinary to those acquainted with
+dear Constance.  But--one may be a worshipped saint and experience
+defection.  The terrible stories one hears of a power of fascination
+almost .  .  .  !' Lady Wathin hung for the word.
+
+'Infernal,' said Lady Dunstane, whose brows had been bent inquiringly.
+'Have no fear.  The freedom you allude to will not be used to interfere
+with any entertainment in prospect.  It was freedom my friend desired.
+Now that her jewel is restored to her, she is not the person to throw it
+away, be sure.  And pray, drop the subject.'
+
+'One may rely .  .  .  you think?'
+
+'Oh!  Oh!'
+
+'This release coming just before the wedding .  .  .  !'
+
+'I should hardly suppose the man to be the puppet you depict, or
+indicate.'
+
+'It is because men--so many--are not puppets that one is conscious of
+alarm.'
+
+'Your previous remark,' said Lady Dunstane, 'sounded superstitious.  Your
+present one has an antipodal basis.  But, as for your alarm, check it:
+and spare me further.  My friend has acknowledged powers.  Considering
+that, she does not use them, you should learn to respect her.'
+
+Lady Wathin bowed stiffly.  She refused to partake of lunch, having, she
+said, satisfied her conscience by the performance of a duty and arranged
+with her flyman to catch a train.  Her cousin Lady Dunstane smiled
+loftily at everything she uttered, and she felt that if a woman like this
+Mrs. Warwick could put division between blood-relatives, she could do
+worse, and was to be dreaded up to the hour of the nuptials.
+
+'I meant no harm in coming,' she said, at the shaking of hands.
+
+'No, no; I understand,' said her hostess: 'you are hen-hearted over your
+adopted brood.  The situation is perceptible and your intention
+creditable.'
+
+As one of the good women of the world, Lady Wathin in departing was
+indignant at the tone and dialect of a younger woman not modestly
+concealing her possession of the larger brain.  Brains in women she both
+dreaded and detested; she believed them to be devilish.  Here were
+instances:--they had driven poor Sir Lukin to evil courses, and that poor
+Mr. Warwick straight under the wheels of a cab.  Sir Lukin's name was
+trotting in public with a naughty Mrs. Fryar-Gunnett's: Mrs. Warwick
+might still trim her arts to baffle the marriage.  Women with brains,
+moreover, are all heartless: they have no pity for distress, no horror of
+catastrophes, no joy in the happiness of the deserving.  Brains in men
+advance a household to station; but brains in women divide it and are the
+wrecking of society.  Fortunately Lady Wathin knew she could rally a
+powerful moral contingent, the aptitude of which for a one-minded
+cohesion enabled it to crush those fractional daughters of mischief.
+She was a really good woman of the world, heading a multitude; the same
+whom you are accustomed to hear exalted; lucky in having had a guided
+girlhood, a thick-curtained prudence; and in having stock in the moral
+funds, shares in the sentimental tramways.  Wherever the world laid its
+hoards or ran its lines, she was found, and forcible enough to be
+eminent; though at fixed hours of the day, even as she washed her hands,
+she abjured worldliness: a performance that cleansed her.  If she did not
+make morality appear loveable to the objects of her dislike, it was owing
+to her want of brains to see the origin, nature and right ends of
+morality.  But a world yet more deficient than she, esteemed her
+cordially for being a bulwark of the present edifice; which looks a
+solid structure when the microscope is not applied to its components.
+
+Supposing Percy Dacier a dishonourable tattler as well as an icy lover,
+and that Lady Wathin, through his bride, had become privy to the secret
+between him and Diana?  There is reason to think that she would have held
+it in terror over the baneful woman, but not have persecuted her: for she
+was by no means the active malignant of theatrical plots.  No, she would
+have charged it upon the possession of brains by women, and have had a
+further motive for inciting the potent dignitary her husband to employ
+his authority to repress the sex's exercise of those fell weapons,
+hurtful alike to them and all coming near them.
+
+So extreme was her dread of Mrs. Warwick, that she drove from the London
+railway station to see Constance and be reassured by her tranquil aspect.
+
+Sweet Constance and her betrothed Percy were together, examining a
+missal.
+
+Lady Dunstane despatched a few words of the facts to Diana.  She hoped to
+hear from her; rather hoped, for the moment, not to see her.  No answer
+came.  The great day of the nuptials came and passed.  She counted on her
+husband's appearance the next morning, as the good gentleman made a point
+of visiting her, to entertain the wife he adored, whenever he had a
+wallet of gossip that would overlay the blank of his absence.  He had
+been to the church of the wedding--he did not say with whom: all the
+world was there; and he rapturously described the ceremony, stating
+that it set women weeping and caused him to behave like a fool.
+
+'You are impressionable,' said his wife.
+
+He murmured something in praise of the institution of marriage--when
+celebrated impressively, it seemed.
+
+'Tony calls the social world "the theatre of appetites," as we have it at
+present,' she said; 'and the world at a wedding is, one may reckon, in
+the second act of the hungry tragicomedy.'
+
+'Yes, there's the breakfast,' Sir Lukin assented.  Mrs. Fryar-Gunnett was
+much more intelligible to him: in fact, quite so, as to her speech.
+
+Emma's heart now yearned to her Tony: Consulting her strength, she
+thought she might journey to London, and on the third morning after the
+Dacier-Asper marriage, she started.
+
+Diana's door was open to Arthur Rhodes when Emma reached it.
+
+'Have you seen her?' she asked him.
+
+His head shook dolefully.  'Mrs. Warwick is unwell; she has been working
+too hard.'
+
+'You also, I'm afraid.'
+
+'No.'  He could deny that, whatever the look of him.
+
+'Come to me at Copsley soon,' said she, entering to Danvers in the
+passage.
+
+'My mistress is upstairs, my lady,' said Danvers.  'She is lying on her
+bed.'
+
+'She is ill?'
+
+'She has been lying on her bed ever since.'
+
+'Since what?' Lady Dunstane spoke sharply.
+
+Danvers retrieved her indiscretion.  'Since she heard of the accident, my
+lady.'
+
+'Take my name to her.  Or no: I can venture.'
+
+'I am not allowed to go in and speak to her.  You will find the room
+quite dark, my lady, and very cold.  It is her command.  My mistress will
+not let me light the fire; and she has not eaten or drunk of anything
+since . . . .  She will die, if you do not persuade her to take
+nourishment: a little, for a beginning.  It wants the beginning.'
+
+Emma went upstairs, thinking of the enigmatical maid, that she must be a
+good soul after all.  Diana's bedroom door was opened slowly.
+
+'You will not be able to see at first, my lady,' Danvers whispered.  'The
+bed is to the left, and a chair.  I would bring in a candle, but it hurts
+her eyes.  She forbids it.'
+
+Emma stepped in.  The chill thick air of the unlighted London room was
+cavernous.  She almost forgot the beloved of her heart in the thought
+that a living woman had been lying here more than two days and nights,
+fasting.  The proof of an uttermost misery revived the circumstances
+within her to render her friend's presence in this desert of darkness
+credible.  She found the bed by touch, silently, and distinguished a dark
+heap on the bed; she heard no breathing.  She sat and listened; then she
+stretched out her hand and met her Tony's.  It lay open.  It was the hand
+of a drowned woman.
+
+Shutters and curtains and the fireless grate gave the room an appalling
+likeness to the vaults.
+
+So like to the home of death it seemed, that in a few minutes the watcher
+had lost count of time and kept but a wormy memory of the daylight.  She
+dared not speak, for some fear of startling; for the worse fear of never
+getting answer.  Tony's hand was lifeless.  Her clasp of it struck no
+warmth.
+
+She stung herself with bitter reproaches for having let common mundane
+sentiments, worthy of a Lady Wathin, bar her instant offer of her bosom
+to the beloved who suffered in this depth of mortal agony.  Tony's love
+of a man, as she should have known, would be wrought of the elements of
+our being: when other women named Happiness, she said Life; in division,
+Death.  Her body lying still upon the bed here was a soul borne onward by
+the river of Death.
+
+The darkness gave sight after a while, like a curtain lifting on a veil:
+the dead light of the underworld.  Tony lay with her face up, her
+underlip dropped; straight from head to feet.  The outline of her face,
+without hue of it, could be seen: sign of the hapless women that have
+souls in love.  Hateful love of men!  Emma thought, and was; moved to
+feel at the wrist for her darling's pulse.  He has, killed her!  the
+thought flashed, as, with pangs chilling her frame, the pressure at the
+wrist continued insensible of the faintest beat.  She clasped it,
+trembling, in pain to stop an outcry.
+
+'It is Emmy,' said the voice.
+
+Emma's heart sprang to heaven on a rush of thanks.
+
+'My Tony,' she breathed softly.
+
+She hung for a further proof of life in the motionless body.  'Tony!' she
+said.
+
+The answer was at her hand, a thread-like return of her clasp.
+
+'It is Emmy come to stay with you, never to leave you.'
+
+The thin still answer was at her hand a moment; the fingers fell away.
+A deep breath was taken twice to say:
+
+'Don't talk to me.'
+
+Emma retained the hand.  She was warned not to press it by the deadness
+following its effort to reply.
+
+But Tony lived; she had given proof of life.  Over this little wavering
+taper in the vaults Emma cowered, cherishing the hand, silently hoping
+for the voice.
+
+It came: 'Winter.'
+
+'It is a cold winter, Tony.'
+
+'My dear will be cold.'
+
+'I will light the fire.'
+
+Emma lost no time in deciding to seek the match-box.  The fire was lit
+and it flamed; it seemed a revival in the room.  Coming back to the
+bedside, she discerned her Tony's lacklustre large dark eyes and her
+hollow cheeks: her mouth open to air as to the drawing-in of a sword;
+rather as to the releaser than the sustainer.  Her feet were on the rug
+her maid had placed to cover them.  Emma leaned across the bed to put
+them to her breast, beneath her fur mantle, and held them there despite
+the half-animate tug of the limbs and the shaft of iciness they sent to
+her very heart.  When she had restored them to some warmth, she threw
+aside her bonnet and lying beside Tony, took her in her arms, heaving now
+and then a deep sigh.
+
+She kissed her cheek.
+
+'It is Emmy.'
+
+'Kiss her.'
+
+'I have no strength.'
+
+Emma laid her face on the lips.  They were cold; even the breath between
+them cold.
+
+'Has Emmy been long .  .  .?'
+
+'Here, dear?  I think so.  I am with my darling.'
+
+Tony moaned.  The warmth and the love were bringing back her anguish.
+
+She said: 'I have been happy.  It is not hard to go.'
+
+Emma strained to her.  'Tony will wait for her soul's own soul to go, the
+two together.'
+
+There was a faint convulsion in the body.  'If I cry, I shall go in
+pain.'
+
+'You are in Emmy's arms, my beloved.'
+
+Tony's eyes closed for forgetfulness under that sensation.  A tear ran
+down from her, but the pain was lag and neighboured sleep, like the
+pleasure.
+
+So passed the short winter day, little spoken.
+
+Then Emma bethought her of a way of leading Tony to take food, and she
+said: 'I shall stay with you; I shall send for clothes; I am rather
+hungry.  Don't stir, dear.  I will be mistress of the house.'
+
+She went below to the kitchen, where a few words in the ear of a
+Frenchwoman were sufficient to waken immediate comprehension of what was
+wanted, and smart service: within ten minutes an appetizing bouillon sent
+its odour over the bedroom.  Tony, days back, had said her last to the
+act of eating; but Emma sipping at the spoon and expressing satisfaction,
+was a pleasant picture.  The bouillon smelt pleasantly.
+
+'Your servants love you,' Emma said.
+
+'Ah, poor good souls.'
+
+'They crowded up to me to hear of you.  Madame of course at the first
+word was off to her pots.  And we English have the habit of calling
+ourselves the practical people!--This bouillon is consummate.--However,
+we have the virtues of barbarians; we can love and serve for love.  I
+never tasted anything so good.  I could become a glutton.'
+
+'Do,' said Tony.
+
+'I should be ashamed to "drain the bowl" all to myself: a solitary toper
+is a horrid creature, unless he makes a song of it.'
+
+'Emmy makes a song of it to me.'
+
+'But "pledge me" is a noble saying, when you think of humanity's original
+hunger for the whole.  It is there that our civilizing commenced, and I
+am particularly fond of hearing the call.  It is grandly historic.  So
+pledge me, Tony.  We two can feed from one spoon; it is a closer, bond
+than the loving cup.  I want you just to taste it and excuse my
+gluttony.'
+
+Tony murmured, 'No.'  The spoon was put to her mouth.  She sighed to
+resist.  The stronger will compelled her to move her lips.  Emma fed her
+as a child, and nature sucked for life.
+
+The first effect was a gush of tears.
+
+Emma lay with her that night, when the patient was, the better sleeper.
+But during the night at intervals she had the happiness of feeling Tony's
+hand travelling to make sure of her.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVII
+
+AN EXHIBITION OF SOME CHAMPIONS OF THE STRICKEN LADY
+
+Close upon the hour of ten every morning the fortuitous meeting of two
+gentlemen at Mrs. Warwick's housedoor was a signal for punctiliously
+stately greetings, the salutation of the raised hat and a bow of the head
+from a position of military erectness, followed by the remark: 'I trust
+you are well, sir': to which the reply: 'I am very well, sir, and trust
+you are the same,' was deemed a complimentary fulfilment of their mutual
+obligation in presence.  Mr. Sullivan Smith's initiative imparted this
+exercise of formal manners to Mr. Arthur Rhodes, whose renewed
+appearance, at the minute of his own arrival, he viewed, as he did not
+conceal, with a disappointed and a reproving eye.  The inquiry after the
+state of Mrs. Warwick's health having received its tolerably comforting
+answer from the footman, they left their cards in turn, then descended
+the doorsteps, faced for the performance of the salute, and departed
+their contrary ways.
+
+The pleasing intelligence refreshed them one morning, that they would.
+be welcomed by Lady Dunstane.  Thereupon Mr. Sullivan Smith wheeled about
+to Mr. Arthur Rhodes and observed to him: 'Sir, I might claim, by right
+of seniority, to be the foremost of us two in offering my respects to the
+lady, but the way is open to you.'
+
+'Sir,' said Mr. Arthur Rhodes, 'permit me to defer to your many superior
+titles to that distinction.'
+
+'The honour, sir, lies rather in the bestowing than in the taking.'
+
+'I venture to think, sir, that though I cannot speak pure Castilian, I
+require no lesson from a Grandee of Spain in acknowledging the dues of my
+betters.'
+
+'I will avow myself conquered, sir, by your overpowering condescension;'
+said Mr. Sullivan Smith; 'and I entreat you--to ascribe my acceptance of
+your brief retirement to the urgent character of the business I have at
+heart.'
+
+He laid his fingers on the panting spot, and bowed.
+
+Mr. Arthur Rhodes, likewise bowing, deferentially fell to rearward.
+
+'If I mistake not,' said the Irish gentleman, 'I am indebted to Mr.
+Rhodes; and we have been joint participators in the hospitality of Mrs.
+Warwick's table.'
+
+The English gentleman replied: 'It was there that I first had the
+pleasure of an acquaintance which is graven on my memory, as the words of
+the wise king on tablets of gold and silver.'
+
+Mr. Sullivan Smith gravely smiled at the unwonted match he had found in
+ceremonious humour, in Saxonland, and saying: 'I shall not long detain
+you, Mr. Rhodes,' he passed through the doorway.
+
+Arthur waited for him, pacing up and down, for a quarter of an hour,
+when a totally different man reappeared in the same person, and was the
+Sullivan Smith of the rosy beaming features and princely heartiness.  He
+was accosted: 'Now, my dear boy, it's your turn to try if you have a
+chance, and good luck go with ye.  I've said what I could on your behalf,
+for you're one of ten thousand in this country, you are.'
+
+Mr. Sullivan Smith had solemnified himself to proffer a sober petition
+within the walls of the newly widowed lady's house; namely, for nothing
+less than that sweet lady's now unfettered hand: and it had therefore
+been perfectly natural to him, until his performance ended with the
+destruction of his hopes, to deliver himself in the high Castilian
+manner.  Quite unexpected, however, was the reciprocal loftiness of
+tone spontaneously adopted by the young English squire, for whom, in
+consequence, he conceived a cordial relish; and as he paced in the
+footsteps of Arthur, anxious to quiet his curiosity by hearing how it
+had fared with one whom he had to suppose the second applicant, he kept
+ejaculating: 'Not a bit!  The fellow can't be Saxon!  And she had a
+liking for him.  She's nigh coming of the age when a woman takes to the
+chicks.  Better he than another, if it's to be any one.  For he's got fun
+in him; he carries his own condiments, instead of borrowing from the
+popular castors, as is their way over here.  But I might have known there
+'s always sure to be salt and savour in the man she covers with her wing.
+Excepting, if you please, my dear lady, a bad shot you made at a rascal
+cur, no more worthy of you than Beelzebub of Paradise.  No matter!  The
+daughters' of Erin must share the fate of their mother Isle, that their
+tears may shine in the burst of sun to follow.  For personal and
+patriotic motives, I would have cheered her and been like a wild ass
+combed and groomed and tamed by the adorable creature.  But her friend
+says there 's not a whisk of a chance for me, and I must roam the desert,
+kicking up, and worshipping the star I hail brightest.  They know me not,
+who think I can't worship.  Why, what were I without my star?  At best a
+pickled porker.'
+
+Sullivan Smith became aware of a ravishing melodiousness in the
+soliloquy, as well as a clean resemblance in the simile.  He would
+certainly have proceeded to improvize impassioned verse, if he had not
+seen Arthur Rhodes on the pavement.  'So, here's the boy.  Query, the
+face he wears.'
+
+'How kind of you to wait,' said Arthur.
+
+'We'll call it sympathy, for convenience,' rejoined Sullivan Smith.
+'Well, and what next?'
+
+'You know as much as I do.  Thank heaven, she is recovering.'
+
+'Is that all?'
+
+'Why, what more?'
+
+Arthur was jealously, inspected.
+
+'You look open-hearted, my dear boy.'  Sullivan Smith blew the sound of a
+reflected ahem.  'Excuse me for cornemusing in your company,' he said.
+'But seriously, there was only one thing to pardon your hurrying to the
+lady's door at such a season, when the wind tells tales to the world.
+She's down with a cold, you know.'
+
+'An influenza,' said Arthur.
+
+The simplicity of the acquiescence was vexatious to a champion desirous
+of hostilities, to vindicate the lady, in addition to his anxiety to
+cloak her sad plight.
+
+'She caught it from contact with one of the inhabitants of this country.
+'Tis the fate of us Irish, and we're condemned to it for the sin of
+getting tired of our own.  I begin to sneeze when I land at Holyhead.
+Unbutton a waistcoat here, in the hope of meeting a heart, and you're
+lucky in escaping a pulmonary attack of no common severity, while the dog
+that infected you scampers off, to celebrate his honeymoon mayhap.  Ah,
+but call at her house in shoals, the world 'll soon be saying it's worse
+than a coughing cold.  If you came to lead her out of it in triumph, the
+laugh 'd be with you, and the lady well covered.  D' ye understand?'
+
+The allusion to the dog's honeymoon had put Arthur Rhodes on the track of
+the darting cracker-metaphor.
+
+'I think I do,' he said.  'She will soon be at Copsley--Lady Dunstane's
+house, on the hills--and there we can see her.'
+
+'And that's next to the happiness of consoling--if only it had been
+granted!  She's not an ordinary widow, to be caught when the tear of
+lamentation has opened a practicable path or water-way to the poor
+nightcapped jewel within.  So, and you're a candid admirer, Mr. Rhodes!
+Well, and I'll be one with you; for there's not a star in the firmament
+more deserving of homage than that lady.'
+
+'Let's walk in the park and talk of her,' said Arthur.  'There's no
+sweeter subject to me.'
+
+His boyish frankness rejoiced Sullivan Smith.  'As long as you like!--nor
+to me!' he exclaimed.  'And that ever since I first beheld her on the
+night of a Ball in Dublin: before I had listened to a word of her
+speaking: and she bore her father's Irish name:--none of your Warwicks
+and your .  .  .  But let the cur go barking.  He can't tell what he's
+lost; perhaps he doesn't care.  And after inflicting his hydrophobia on
+her tender fame!  Pooh, sir; you call it a civilized country, where you
+and I and dozens of others are ready to start up as brothers of the lady,
+to defend her, and are paralyzed by the Law.  'Tis a law they've
+instituted for the protection of dirty dogs--their majority!'
+
+'I owe more to Mrs. Warwick than to any soul I know,' said Arthur.
+
+' Let 's hear,' quoth Sullivan Smith; proceeding: 'She's the Arabian
+Nights in person, that's sure; and Shakespeare's Plays, tragic and comic;
+and the Book of Celtic History; and Erin incarnate--down with a cold,
+no matter where; but we know where it was caught.  So there's a pretty
+library for who's to own her now she's enfranchized by circumstances; and
+a poetical figure too!'
+
+He subsided for his companion to rhapsodize.
+
+Arthur was overcharged with feeling, and could say only: 'It would be
+another world to me if I lost her.'
+
+'True; but what of the lady?'
+
+'No praise of mine could do her justice.'
+
+'That may be, but it's negative of yourself, and not a portrait of the
+object.  Hasn't she the brain of Socrates--or better, say Minerva, on the
+bust of Venus, and the remainder of her finished off to an exact
+resemblance of her patronymic Goddess of the bow and quiver?'
+
+'She has a wise head and is beautiful.'
+
+'And chaste.'
+
+Arthur reddened: he was prepared to maintain it, could not speak it.
+
+'She is to us in this London, what the run of water was to Theocritus in
+Sicily: the nearest to the visibly divine,' he said, and was applauded.
+
+'Good, and on you go.  Top me a few superlatives on that, and I 'm your
+echo, my friend.  Isn't the seeing and listening to her like sitting
+under the silvery canopy of a fountain in high Summer?'
+
+'All the comparisons are yours,' Arthur said enviously.
+
+'Mr. Rhodes, you are a poet, I believe, and all you require to loosen
+your tongue is a drop of Bacchus, so if you will do me the extreme honour
+to dine with me at my Club this evening, we'll resume the toast that
+should never be uttered dry.  You reprove me justly, my friend.'
+
+Arthur laughed and accepted.  The Club was named, and the hour, and some
+items of the little dinner: the birds and the year of the wines.
+
+It surprised him to meet Mr. Redworth at the table of his host.  A
+greater surprise was the partial thaw in Redworth's bearing toward him.
+But, as it was partial, and he a youth and poor, not even the genial
+influences of Bacchus could lift him to loosen his tongue under the
+repressing presence of the man he knew to be his censor, though Sullivan
+Smith encouraged him with praises and opportunities.  He thought of the
+many occasions when Mrs. Warwick's art of management had produced a tacit
+harmony between them.  She had no peer.  The dinner failed of the
+pleasure he had expected from it.  Redworth's bluntness killed the flying
+metaphors, and at the end of the entertainment he and Sullivan Smith were
+drumming upon politics.
+
+'Fancies he has the key of the Irish difficulty!' said the latter,
+clapping hand on his shoulder, by way of blessing, as they parted at the
+Club-steps.
+
+Redworth asked Arthur Rhodes the way he was going, and walked beside him.
+
+'I suppose you take exercise; don't get colds and that kind of thing,' he
+remarked in the old bullying fashion; and changed it abruptly.  'I am
+glad to have met you this evening.  I hope you'll dine with me one day
+next week.  Have you seen Mrs. Warwick lately?'
+
+'She is unwell; she has been working too hard,' said Arthur.
+
+'Seriously unwell, do you mean?'
+
+'Lady Dunstane is at her house, and speaks of her recovering.'
+
+'Ah.  You've not seen her?'
+
+'Not yet.'
+
+'Well, good-night.'
+
+Redworth left him, and only when moved by gratitude to the lad for his
+mention of Mrs. Warwick's 'working too hard,' as the cause of her
+illness, recollected the promised dinner and the need for having his
+address.
+
+He had met Sullivan Smith accidentally in the morning and accepted the
+invitation to meet young Rhodes, because these two, of all men living,
+were for the moment dearest to him, as Diana Warwick's true and simple
+champions; and he had intended a perfect cordiality toward them both; the
+end being a semi-wrangle with the patriot, and a patronizing bluntness
+with the boy; who, by the way, would hardly think him sincere in the
+offer of a seat at his table.  He owned himself incomplete.  He never
+could do the thing he meant, in the small matters not leading to fortune.
+But they led to happiness!  Redworth was guilty of a sigh: for now Diana
+Warwick stood free; doubly free, he was reduced to reflect in a wavering
+dubiousness.  Her more than inclination for Dacier, witnessed by him, and
+the shot of the world, flying randomly on the subject, had struck this
+cuirassier, making light of his armour, without causing any change of his
+habitual fresh countenance.  As for the scandal, it had never shaken his
+faith in her nature.  He thought of the passion.  His heart struck at
+Diana's, and whatever might by chance be true in the scandal affected him
+little, if but her heart were at liberty.  That was the prize he coveted,
+having long read the nature of the woman and wedded his spirit to it.
+She would complete him.
+
+Of course, infatuated men argue likewise, and scandal does not move them.
+At a glance, the lower instincts and the higher spirit appear equally to
+have the philosophy of overlooking blemishes.  The difference between
+appetite and love is shown when a man, after years of service, can hear
+and see, and admit the possible, and still desire in worship; knowing
+that we of earth are begrimed and must be cleansed for presentation daily
+on our passage through the miry ways, but that our souls, if flame of a
+soul shall have come of the agony of flesh, are beyond the baser
+mischances: partaking of them indeed, but sublimely.  Now Redworth
+believed in the soul of Diana.  For him it burned, and it was a celestial
+radiance about her, unquenched by her shifting fortunes, her wilfulnesses
+and, it might be, errors.  She was a woman and weak; that is, not trained
+for strength.  She was a soul; therefore perpetually pointing to growth
+in purification.  He felt it, and even discerned it of her, if he could
+not have phrased it.  The something sovereignty characteristic that
+aspired in Diana enchained him.  With her, or rather with his thought of
+her soul, he understood the right union of women and men, from the roots
+to the flowering heights of that rare graft.  She gave him comprehension
+of the meaning of love: a word in many mouths, not often explained.  With
+her, wound in his idea of her, he perceived it to signify a new start in
+our existence, a finer shoot of the tree stoutly planted in good gross
+earth; the senses running their live sap, and the minds companioned, and
+the spirits made one by the whole-natured conjunction.  In Booth, a happy
+prospect for the sons and daughters of Earth, divinely indicating more
+than happiness: the speeding of us, compact of what we are, between the
+ascetic rocks and the sensual whirlpools, to the creation of certain
+nobler races, now very dimly imagined.
+
+Singularly enough, the man of these feelings was far from being a social
+rebel.  His Diana conjured them forth in relation to her, but was not on
+his bosom to enlighten him generally.  His notions of citizenship
+tolerated the female Pharisees, as ladies offering us an excellent social
+concrete where quicksands abound, and without quite justifying the Lady
+Wathins and Constance Aspers of the world, whose virtues he could set
+down to accident or to acid blood, he considered them supportable and
+estimable where the Mrs. Fryar-Gunnetts were innumerable, threatening to
+become a majority; as they will constantly do while the sisterhood of the
+chaste are wattled in formalism and throned in sourness.
+
+Thoughts of Diana made phantoms of the reputable and their reverse alike.
+He could not choose but think of her.  She was free; and he too; and they
+were as distant as the horizon sail and the aft-floating castaway.  Her
+passion for Dacier might have burnt out her heart.  And at present he had
+no claim to visit her, dared not intrude.  He would have nothing to say,
+if he went, save to answer questions upon points of business: as to
+which, Lady Dunstane would certainly summon him when he was wanted.
+
+Riding in the park on a frosty morning, he came upon Sir Lukin, who
+looked gloomy and inquired for news of Diana Warwick, saying that his
+wife had forbidden him to call at her house just yet.  'She's got a cold,
+you know,' said Sir Lukin; adding, 'confoundedly hard on women!--eh?
+Obliged to keep up a show.  And I'd swear, by all that's holy, Diana
+Warwick hasn't a spot, not a spot, to reproach herself with.  I fancy
+I ought to know women by this time.  And look here, Redworth, last night
+--that is, I mean yesterday evening, I broke with a woman--a lady of my
+acquaintance, you know, because she would go on scandal-mongering about
+Diana Warwick.  I broke with her.  I told her I'd have out any man who
+abused Diana Warwick, and I broke with her.  By Jove!  Redworth, those
+women can prove spitfires.  They've bags of venom under their tongues,
+barley-sugar though they look--and that's her colour.  But I broke with
+her for good.  I doubt if I shall ever call on her again.  And in point
+of fact, I won't.'
+
+Mrs. Fryar-Gunnett was described in the colouring of the lady.
+
+Sir Lukin, after some further remarks, rode on, and Redworth mused on a
+moral world that allows a woman of Mrs. Fryar-Gunnett's like to hang on
+to it, and to cast a stone at Diana; forgetful, in his championship, that
+Diana was not disallowed a similar licence.
+
+When he saw Emma Dunstane, some days later, she was in her carriage
+driving, as she said, to Lawyerland, for an interview with old Mr.
+Braddock, on her friend's affairs.  He took a seat beside her.  'No, Tony
+is not well,' she replied to his question, under the veil of candour.
+'She is recovering, but she--you can understand--suffered a shock.  She
+is not able to attend to business, and certain things have to be done.'
+
+'I used to be her man of business,' Redworth observed.
+
+'She speaks of your kind services.  This is mere matter for lawyers.'
+
+'She is recovering?'
+
+'You may see her at Copsley next week.  You can come down on Wednesdays
+or Saturdays?'
+
+'Any day.  Tell her I want her opinion upon the state of things.'
+
+'It will please her; but you will have to describe the state of things.'
+
+Emma feared she had said too much.  She tried candour again for
+concealment.  'My poor Tony has been struck down low.  I suppose it is
+like losing a diseased limb:--she has her freedom, at the cost of a blow
+to the system.'
+
+'She may be trusted for having strength,' said Redworth.'
+
+'Yes.'  Emma's mild monosyllable was presently followed by an
+exclamation: 'One has to experience the irony of Fate to comprehend how
+cruel it is!'  Then she remembered that such language was peculiarly
+abhorrent to him.
+
+'Irony of Fate!' he echoed her.  'I thought you were above that literary
+jargon.'
+
+'And I thought I was: or thought it would be put in a dialect practically
+explicable,' she answered, smiling at the lion roused.
+
+'Upon my word,' he burst out, 'I should like to write a book of Fables,
+showing how donkeys get into grinding harness, and dogs lose their bones,
+and fools have their sconces cracked, and all run jabbering of the irony
+of Fate, to escape the annoyance of tracing the causes.  And what are
+they?  nine times out of ten, plain want of patience, or some debt for
+indulgence.  There's a subject:--let some one write, Fables in
+illustration of the irony of Fate: and I'll undertake to tack-on my
+grandmother's maxims for a moral to teach of 'em.  We prate of that irony
+when we slink away from the lesson--the rod we conjure.  And you to talk
+of Fate!  It's the seed we sow, individually or collectively.  I'm bound-
+up in the prosperity of the country, and if the ship is wrecked, it ruins
+my fortune, but not me, unless I'm bound-up in myself.  At least I hope
+that's my case.'
+
+He apologized for intruding Mr. Thomas Redworth.
+
+His hearer looked at him, thinking he required a more finely pointed gift
+of speech for the ironical tongue, but relishing the tonic directness of
+his faculty of reason while she considered that the application of the
+phrase might be brought home to him so as to render 'my Grandmother's
+moral' a conclusion less comfortingly, if quite intelligibly, summary.
+And then she thought of Tony's piteous instance; and thinking with her
+heart, the tears insisted on that bitter irony of the heavens, which
+bestowed the long-withheld and coveted boon when it was empty of value
+or was but as a handful of spices to a shroud.
+
+Perceiving the moisture in her look, Redworth understood that it was
+foolish to talk rationally.  But on her return to her beloved, the real
+quality of the man had overcome her opposing state of sentiment, and she
+spoke of him with an iteration and throb in the voice that set a singular
+query whirring round Diana's ears.  Her senses were too heavy for a
+suspicion.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVIII
+
+CONVALESCENCE OF A HEALTHY MIND DISTRAUGHT
+
+From an abandonment that had the last pleasure of life in a willingness
+to yield it up, Diana rose with her friend's help in some state of
+fortitude, resembling the effort of her feet to bear the weight of her
+body.  She plucked her courage out of the dust to which her heart had
+been scattered, and tasked herself to walk as the world does.  But she
+was indisposed to compassionate herself in the manner of the burdened
+world.  She lashed the creature who could not raise a head like others,
+and made the endurance of torture a support, such as the pride of being
+is to men.  She would not have seen any similarity to pride in it; would
+have deemed it the reverse.  It was in fact the painful gathering of the
+atoms composing pride.  For she had not only suffered; she had done
+wrongly: and when that was acknowledged, by the light of her sufferings
+the wrong-doing appeared gigantic, chorussing eulogies of the man she had
+thought her lover: and who was her lover once, before the crime against
+him.  In the opening of her bosom to Emma, he was painted a noble figure;
+one of those that Romance delights to harass for the sake of ultimately
+the more exquisitely rewarding.  He hated treachery: she had been guilty
+of doing what he most hated.  She glorified him for the incapacity to
+forgive; it was to her mind godlike.  And her excuses of herself?
+
+At the first confession, she said she had none, and sullenly maintained
+that there was none to exonerate.  Little by little her story was
+related--her version of the story: for not even as woman to woman, friend
+to great-hearted friend, pure soul to soul, could Diana tell of the state
+of shivering abjection in which Dacier had left her on the fatal night;
+of the many causes conducing to it, and of the chief.  That was an
+unutterable secret, bound by all the laws of feminine civilization not to
+be betrayed.  Her excessive self-abasement and exaltation of him who had
+struck her down, rendered it difficult to be understood; and not till
+Emma had revolved it and let it ripen in the mind some days could she
+perceive with any clearness her Tony's motives, or mania.  The very word
+Money thickened the riddle: for Tony knew that her friend's purse was her
+own to dip in at her pleasure; yet she, to escape so small an obligation,
+had committed the enormity for which she held the man blameless in
+spurning her.
+
+'You see what I am, Emmy,' Diana said.
+
+'What I do not see, is that he had grounds for striking so cruelly.'
+
+'I proved myself unworthy of him.'
+
+But does a man pretending to love a woman cut at one blow, for such a
+cause, the ties uniting her to him?  Unworthiness of that kind, is not
+commonly the capital offence in love.  Tony's deep prostration and her
+resplendent picture of her judge and executioner, kept Emma questioning
+within herself.  Gradually she became enlightened enough to distinguish
+in the man a known, if not common, type of the externally soft and
+polished, internally hard and relentless, who are equal to the trials of
+love only as long as favouring circumstances and seemings nurse the fair
+object of their courtship.
+
+Her thoughts recurred to the madness driving Tony to betray the secret;
+and the ascent unhelped to get a survey of it and her and the conditions,
+was mountainous.  She toiled up but to enter the regions of cloud; sure
+nevertheless that the obscurity was penetrable and excuses to be
+discovered somewhere.  Having never wanted money herself, she was unable
+perfectly to realize the urgency of the need: she began however to
+comprehend that the very eminent gentleman, before whom all human
+creatures were to bow in humility, had for an extended term considerably
+added to the expenses of Tony's household, by inciting her to give those
+little dinners to his political supporters, and bringing comrades
+perpetually to supper-parties, careless of how it might affect her
+character and her purse.  Surely an honourable man was bound to her in
+honour? Tony's remark: 'I have the reptile in me, dear,' her exaggeration
+of the act, in her resigned despair,--was surely no justification for his
+breaking from her, even though he had discovered a vestige of the common
+'reptile,' to leave her with a stain on her name?--There would not have
+been a question about it if Tony had not exalted him so loftily,
+refusing, in visible pain, to hear him blamed.
+
+Danvers had dressed a bed for Lady Dunstane in her mistress's chamber,
+where often during the night Emma caught a sound of stifled weeping or
+the long falling breath of wakeful grief.  One night she asked whether
+Tony would like to have her by her side.
+
+'No, dear,' was the answer in the dark; 'but you know my old pensioners,
+the blind fifer and his wife; I've been thinking of them.'
+
+'They were paid as they passed down the street yesterday, my love.'
+
+'Yes, dear, I hope so.  But he flourishes his tune so absurdly.  I've
+been thinking, that is the part I have played, instead of doing the
+female's duty of handing round the tin-cup for pennies.  I won't cry any
+more.'
+
+She sighed and turned to sleep, leaving Emma to disburden her heart in
+tears.
+
+For it seemed to her that Tony's intellect was weakened.  She not merely
+abased herself and exalted Dacier preposterously, she had sunk her
+intelligence in her sensations: a state that she used to decry as the sin
+of mankind, the origin of error and blood.
+
+Strangely too, the proposal came from her, or the suggestion of it,
+notwithstanding her subjectedness to the nerves, that she should show
+her face in public.  She said: 'I shall have to run about, Emmy, when I
+can fancy I am able to rattle up to the old mark.  At present, I feel
+like a wrestler who has had a fall.  As soon as the stiffness is over,
+it's best to make an appearance, for the sake of one's backers, though I
+shall never be in the wrestling ring again.'
+
+'That is a good decision--when you feel quite yourself, dear Tony,' Emma
+replied.
+
+'I dare say I have disgraced my sex, but not as they suppose.  I feel my
+new self already, and can make the poor brute go through fire on behalf
+of the old.  What is the task?--merely to drive a face!'
+
+'It is not known.'
+
+'It will be known.'
+
+'But this is a sealed secret.'
+
+'Nothing is a secret that has been spoken.  It 's in the air, and I have
+to breathe to live by it.  And I would rather it were out.  "She betrayed
+him."  Rather that, than have them think--anything!  They will exclaim,
+How could she!  I have been unable to answer it to you--my own heart.
+How?  Oh!  our weakness is the swiftest dog to hunt us; we cannot escape
+it.  But I have the answer for them, that I trust with my whole soul none
+of them would have done the like.'
+
+'None, my Tony, would have taken it to the soul as you do.'
+
+'I talk, dear.  If I took it honestly, I should be dumb, soon dust.
+The moment we begin to speak, the guilty creature is running for cover.
+She could not otherwise exist.  I am sensible of evasion when I open my
+lips.'
+
+'But Tony has told me all.'
+
+'I think I have.  But if you excuse my conduct, I am certain I have not.'
+
+'Dear girl, accounting for it, is not the same as excusing.'
+
+'Who can account for it!  I was caught in a whirl--Oh!  nothing
+supernatural: my weakness; which it pleases me to call a madness--shift
+the ninety-ninth!  When I drove down that night to Mr. Tonans, I am
+certain I had my clear wits, but I felt like a bolt.  I saw things,
+but at too swift a rate for the conscience of them.  Ah! let never
+Necessity draw the bow of our weakness: it is the soul that is winged to
+its perdition.  I remember I was writing a story, named THE MAN OF TWO
+MINDS.  I shall sign it, By the Woman of Two Natures.  If ever it is
+finished.  Capacity for thinking should precede the act of writing.  It
+should; I do not say that it does.  Capacity for assimilating the public
+taste and reproducing it, is the commonest.  The stuff is perishable, but
+it pays us for our labour, and in so doing saves us from becoming
+tricksters.  Now I can see that Mr. Redworth had it in that big head of
+his--the authoress outliving her income!'
+
+'He dared not speak.'
+
+'Why did he not dare?'
+
+'Would it have checked you?'
+
+'I was a shot out of a gun, and I am glad he did not stand in my way.
+What power charged the gun, is another question.  Dada used to say, that
+it is the devil's masterstroke to get us to accuse him.  "So fare ye
+well, old Nickie Ben."  My dear, I am a black sheep; a creature with a
+spotted reputation; I must wash and wash; and not with water--with
+sulphur-flames.'  She sighed.  'I am down there where they burn.  You
+should have let me lie and die.  You were not kind.  I was going
+quietly.'
+
+'My love!' cried Emma, overborne by a despair that she traced to the
+woman's concealment of her bleeding heart, 'you live for me.  Do set your
+mind on that.  Think of what you are bearing, as your debt to Emma.  Will
+you?'
+
+Tony bowed her head mechanically.
+
+'But I am in love with King Death, and must confess it,' she said.  'That
+hideous eating you forced on me, snatched me from him.  And I feel that
+if I had gone, I should have been mercifully forgiven by everybody.'
+
+'Except by me,' said Emma, embracing her.  'Tony would have left her
+friend for her last voyage in mourning.  And my dearest will live to know
+happiness.'
+
+'I have no more belief in it, Emmy.'
+
+'The mistake of the world is to think happiness possible to the senses.'
+
+'Yes; we distil that fine essence through the senses; and the act is
+called the pain of life.  It is the death of them.  So much I understand
+of what our existence must be.  But I may grieve for having done so
+little.'
+
+'That is the sound grief, with hope at the core--not in love with itself
+and wretchedly mortal, as we find self is under every shape it takes;
+especially the chief one.'
+
+'Name it.'
+
+'It is best named Amor.'
+
+There was a writhing in the frame of the hearer, for she did want Love to
+be respected; not shadowed by her misfortune.  Her still-flushed senses
+protested on behalf of the eternalness of the passion, and she was
+obliged to think Emma's cold condemnatory intellect came of the no
+knowledge of it.
+
+A letter from Mr. Tonans, containing an enclosure, was a sharp trial of
+Diana's endurance of the irony of Fate.  She had spoken of the irony in
+allusion to her freedom.  Now that, according to a communication from her
+lawyers, she was independent of the task of writing, the letter which
+paid the price of her misery bruised her heavily.
+
+'Read it and tear it all to strips,' she said in an abhorrence to Emma,
+who rejoined: 'Shall I go at once and see him?'
+
+'Can it serve any end?  But throw it into the fire.  Oh! no simulation of
+virtue.  There was not, I think, a stipulated return for what I did.  But
+I perceive clearly--I can read only by events--that there was an
+understanding.  You behold it.  I went to him to sell it.  He thanks me,
+says I served the good cause well.  I have not that consolation.  If I
+had thought of the cause--of anything high, it would have arrested me.
+On the fire with it!'
+
+The letter and square slip were consumed.  Diana watched the blackening
+papers.
+
+So they cease their sinning, Emmy; and as long as I am in torment, I may
+hope for grace.  We talked of the irony.  It means, the pain of fire.'
+
+'I spoke of the irony to Redworth,' said Emma; 'incidentally, of course.'
+
+'And he fumed?'
+
+'He is really not altogether the Mr. Cuthbert Dering of your caricature.
+He is never less than acceptably rational.  I won't repeat his truisms;
+but he said, or I deduced from what he said, that a grandmother's maxims
+would expound the enigma.'
+
+'Probably the simple is the deep, in relation to the mysteries of life,'
+said Diana, whose wits had been pricked to a momentary activity by the
+letter.  'He behaves wisely; so perhaps we are bound to take his words
+for wisdom.  Much nonsense is talked and written, and he is one of the
+world's reserves, who need no more than enrolling, to make a sturdy
+phalanx of common sense.  It's a pity they are not enlisted and drilled
+to express themselves.'  She relapsed.  'But neither he nor any of them
+could understand my case.'
+
+'He puts the idea of an irony down to the guilt of impatience, Tony.'
+
+'Could there be a keener irony than that?  A friend of Dada's waited
+patiently for a small fortune, and when it arrived, he was a worn-out
+man, just assisted to go decently to his grave.'
+
+'But he may have gained in spirit by his patient waiting.'
+
+'Oh!  true.  We are warmer if we travel on foot sunward, but it is a
+discovery that we are colder if we take to ballooning upward.  The
+material good reverses its benefits the more nearly we clasp it.  All
+life is a lesson that we live to enjoy but in the spirit.  I will brood
+on your saying.'
+
+'It is your own saying, silly Tony, as the only things worth saying
+always, are!' exclaimed Emma, as she smiled happily to see her friend's
+mind reviving, though it was faintly and in the dark.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIX
+
+OF NATURE WITH ONE OF HER CULTIVATED DAUGHTERS AND A SHORT EXCURSION IN
+ANTI-CLIMAX
+
+A mind that after a long season of oblivion in pain returns to
+wakefulness without a keen edge for the world, is much in danger of
+souring permanently.  Diana's love of nature saved her from the dire
+mischance during a two months' residence at Copsley, by stupefying her
+senses to a state like the barely conscious breathing on the verge of
+sleep.  February blew South-west for the pairing of the birds.  A broad
+warm wind rolled clouds of every ambiguity of form in magnitude over
+peeping azure, or skimming upon lakes of blue and lightest green, or
+piling the amphitheatre for majestic sunset.  Or sometimes those
+daughters of the wind flew linked and low, semi-purple, threatening the
+shower they retained and teaching gloom to rouse a songful nest in the
+bosom of the viewer.  Sometimes they were April, variable to soar with
+rain-skirts and sink with sunshafts.  Or they drenched wood and field for
+a day and opened on the high South-western star.  Daughters of the wind,
+but shifty daughters of this wind of the dropping sun, they have to be
+watched to be loved in their transformations.
+
+Diana had Arthur Rhodes and her faithful Leander for walking companions.
+If Arthur said: 'Such a day would be considered melancholy by London
+people,' she thanked him in her heart, as a benefactor who had revealed
+to her things of the deepest.  The simplest were her food.  Thus does
+Nature restore us, by drugging the brain and making her creature
+confidingly animal for its new growth.  She imagined herself to have lost
+the power to think; certainly she had not the striving or the wish.
+Exercise of her limbs to reach a point of prospect, and of her ears and
+eyes to note what bird had piped, what flower was out on the banks, and
+the leaf of what tree it was that lay beneath the budding, satiated her
+daily desires.  She gathered unknowingly a sheaf of landscapes, images,
+keys of dreamed horizons, that opened a world to her at any chance
+breath altering shape or hue: a different world from the one of her
+old ambition.  Her fall had brought her renovatingly to earth, and the
+saving naturalness of the woman recreated her childlike, with shrouded
+recollections of her strange taste of life behind her; with a tempered
+fresh blood to enjoy aimlessly, and what would erewhile have been a
+barrenness to her sensibilities.
+
+In time the craving was evolved for positive knowledge, and shells and
+stones and weeds were deposited on the library-table at Copsley,
+botanical and geological books comparingly examined, Emma Dunstane always
+eager to assist; for the samples wafted her into the heart of the woods.
+Poor Sir Lukin tried three days of their society, and was driven away
+headlong to Club-life.  He sent down Redworth, with whom the walks of the
+zealous inquirers were profitable, though Diana, in acknowledging it to
+herself, reserved a decided preference for her foregone ethereal mood,
+larger, and untroubled by the presence of a man.  The suspicion Emma had
+sown was not excited to an alarming activity; but she began to question:
+could the best of men be simply--a woman's friend?--was not long service
+rather less than a proof of friendship?  She could be blind when her
+heart was on fire for another.  Her passion for her liberty, however,
+received no ominous warning to look to the defences.  He was the same
+blunt speaker, and knotted his brows as queerly as ever at Arthur, in a
+transparent calculation of how this fellow meant to gain his livelihood.
+She wilfully put it to the credit of Arthur's tact that his elder was
+amiable, without denying her debt to the good man for leaving her illness
+and her appearance unmentioned.  He forbore even to scan her features.
+Diana's wan contemplativeness, in which the sparkle of meaning slowly
+rose to flash, as we see a bubble rising from the deeps of crystal
+waters, caught at his heart while he talked his matter-of-fact.  But her
+instinct of a present safety was true.  She and Arthur discovered--and it
+set her first meditating whether she did know the man so very accurately
+--that he had printed, for private circulation, when at Harrow School, a
+little book, a record of his observations in nature.  Lady Dunstane was
+the casual betrayer.  He shrugged at the nonsense of a boy's publishing;
+anybody's publishing he held for a doubtful proof of sanity.  His excuse
+was, that he had not published opinions.  Let us observe, and assist in
+our small sphere; not come mouthing to the footlights!
+
+'We retire,' Diana said, for herself and Arthur.
+
+'The wise thing, is to avoid the position that enforces publishing,' said
+he, to the discomposure of his raw junior.
+
+In the fields he was genially helpful; commending them to the study of
+the South-west wind, if they wanted to forecast the weather and
+understand the climate of our country.  'We have no Seasons, or only a
+shuffle of them.  Old calendars give seven months of the year to the
+Southwest, and that's about the average.  Count on it, you may generally
+reckon what to expect.  When you don't have the excess for a year or two,
+you are drenched the year following.'  He knew every bird by its flight
+and its pipe, habits, tricks, hints of sagacity homely with the original
+human; and his remarks on the sensitive life of trees and herbs were a
+spell to his thirsty hearers.  Something of astronomy he knew; but in
+relation to that science, he sank his voice, touchingly to Diana, who
+felt drawn to kinship with him when he had a pupil's tone.  An allusion
+by Arthur to the poetical work of Aratus, led to a memorably pleasant
+evening's discourse upon the long reading of the stars by these our
+mortal eyes.  Altogether the mind of the practical man became
+distinguishable to them as that of a plain brother of the poetic.  Diana
+said of him to Arthur: 'He does not supply me with similes; he points to
+the source of them.'  Arthur, with envy of the man of positive knowledge,
+disguised an unstrung heart in agreeing.
+
+Redworth alluded passingly to the condition of public affairs.  Neither
+of them replied.  Diana was wondering how one who perused the eternal of
+nature should lend a thought to the dusty temporary of the world.
+Subsequently she reflected that she was asking him to confine his great
+male appetite to the nibble of bread which nourished her immediate sense
+of life.  Her reflections were thin as mist, coming and going like the
+mist, with no direction upon her brain, if they sprang from it.  When he
+had gone, welcome though Arthur had seen him to be, she rebounded to a
+broader and cheerfuller liveliness.  Arthur was flattered by an idea of
+her casting off incubus--a most worthy gentleman, and a not perfectly
+sympathetic associate.  Her eyes had their lost light in them, her step
+was brisker; she challenged him to former games of conversation,
+excursions in blank verse here and there, as the mood dictated.  They
+amused themselves, and Emma too.  She revelled in seeing Tony's younger
+face and hearing some of her natural outbursts.  That Dacier never could
+have been the man for her, would have compressed and subjected her, and
+inflicted a further taste of bondage in marriage, she was assured.  She
+hoped for the day when Tony would know it, and haply that another, whom
+she little comprehended, was her rightful mate.
+
+March continued South-westerly and grew rainier, as Redworth had
+foretold, bidding them look for gales and storm, and then the change of
+wind.  It came, after wettings of a couple scorning the refuge of dainty
+townsfolk under umbrellas, and proud of their likeness to dripping
+wayside wildflowers.  Arthur stayed at Copsley for a week of the crisp
+North-easter; and what was it, when he had taken his leave, that brought
+Tony home from her solitary walk in dejection?  It could not be her
+seriously regretting the absence of the youthful companion she had parted
+with gaily, appointing a time for another meeting on the heights, and
+recommending him to repair idle hours with strenuous work.  The fit
+passed and was not explained.  The winds are sharp with memory.  The hard
+shrill wind crowed to her senses of an hour on the bleak sands of the
+French coast; the beginning of the curtained misery, inscribed as her
+happiness.  She was next day prepared for her term in London with Emma,
+who promised her to make an expedition at the end of it by way of
+holiday, to see The Crossways, which Mr. Redworth said was not tenanted.
+
+'You won't go through it like a captive?' said Emma.
+
+'I don't like it, dear,' Diana put up a comic mouth.  'The debts we owe
+ourselves are the hardest to pay.  That is the discovery of advancing
+age: and I used to imagine it was quite the other way.  But they are the
+debts of honour, imperative.  I shall go through it grandly, you will
+see.  If I am stopped at my first recreancy and turned directly the
+contrary way, I think I have courage.'
+
+'You will not fear to meet .  .  . any one?' said Emma.
+
+'The world and all it contains!  I am robust, eager for the fray, an
+Amazon, a brazen-faced hussy.  Fear and I have parted.  I shall not do
+you discredit.  Besides you intend to have me back here with you?  And
+besides again, I burn to make a last brave appearance.  I have not
+outraged the world, dear Emmy, whatever certain creatures in it may
+fancy.'
+
+She had come out of her dejectedness with a shrewder view of Dacier;
+equally painful, for it killed her romance, and changed the garden of
+their companionship in imagination to a waste.  Her clearing intellect
+prompted it, whilst her nature protested, and reviled her to uplift him.
+He had loved her.  'I shall die knowing that a man did love me once,' she
+said to her widowed heart, and set herself blushing and blanching.  But
+the thought grew inveterate: 'He could not bear much.'  And in her quick
+brain it shot up a crop of similitudes for the quality of that man's
+love.  She shuddered, as at a swift cleaving of cold steel.  He had not
+given her a chance; he had not replied to her letter written with the pen
+dipped in her heart's blood; he must have gone straight away to the woman
+he married.  This after almost justifying the scandalous world:--after
+.  .  .  She realized her sensations of that night when the house-door
+had closed on him; her feeling of lost sovereignty, degradation, feminine
+danger, friendliness: and she was unaware, and never knew, nor did the
+world ever know, what cunning had inspired the frosty Cupid to return to
+her and be warmed by striking a bargain for his weighty secret.  She knew
+too well that she was not of the snows which do not melt, however high
+her conceit of herself might place her.  Happily she now stood out of the
+sun, in a bracing temperature, Polar; and her compassion for women was
+deeply sisterly in tenderness and understanding.  She spoke of it to Emma
+as her gain.
+
+'I have not seen that you required to suffer to be considerate,' Emma
+said.
+
+'It is on my conscience that I neglected Mary Paynham, among others--and
+because you did not take to her, Emmy.'
+
+'The reading of it appears to me, that she has neglected you.'
+
+'She was not in my confidence, and so I construe it as delicacy.  One
+never loses by believing the best.'
+
+'If one is not duped.'
+
+'Expectations dupe us, not trust.  The light of every soul burns upward.
+Of course, most of them are candles in the wind.  Let us allow for
+atmospheric disturbance.  Now I thank you, dear, for bringing me back to
+life.  I see that I was really a selfish suicide, because I feel I have
+power to do some good, and belong to the army.  When we are beginning to
+reflect, as I do now, on a recovered basis of pure health, we have the
+world at the dawn and know we are young in it, with great riches, great
+things gained and greater to achieve.  Personally I behold a queer little
+wriggling worm for myself; but as one, of the active world I stand high
+and shapely; and the very thought of doing work, is like a draught of the
+desert-springs to me.  Instead of which, I have once more to go about
+presenting my face to vindicate my character.  Mr. Redworth would admit
+no irony in that!  At all events, it is anti-climax.'
+
+'I forgot to tell you, Tony, you have been proposed for,' said Emma; and
+there was a rush of savage colour over Tony's cheeks.
+
+Her apparent apprehensions were relieved by hearing the name of Mr.
+Sullivan Smith.
+
+'My poor dear countryman!  And he thought me worthy, did he?  Some day,
+when we are past his repeating it, I'll thank him.'
+
+The fact of her smiling happily at the narration of Sullivan Smith's
+absurd proposal by mediatrix, proved to Emma how much her nature thirsted
+for the smallest support in her self-esteem.
+
+The second campaign of London was of bad augury at the commencement,
+owing to the ridiculous intervention of a street-organ, that ground its
+pipes in a sprawling roar of one of the Puritani marches, just as the
+carriage was landing them at the door of her house.  The notes were
+harsh, dissonant, drunken, interlocked and horribly torn asunder,
+intolerable to ears not keen to extract the tune through dreadful
+memories.  Diana sat startled and paralyzed.  The melody crashed a
+revival of her days with Dacier, as in gibes; and yet it reached to her
+heart.  She imagined a Providence that was trying her on the threshold,
+striking at her feebleness.  She had to lock herself in her room for an
+hour of deadly abandonment to misery, resembling the run of poison
+through her blood, before she could bear to lift eyes on her friend; to
+whom subsequently she said: 'Emmy, there are wounds that cut sharp as the
+enchanter's sword, and we don't know we are in halves till some rough old
+intimate claps us on the back, merely to ask us how we are!  I have to
+join myself together again, as well as I can.  It's done, dear; but don't
+notice the cement.'
+
+'You will be brave,' Emma petitioned.
+
+'I long to show you I will.'
+
+The meeting with those who could guess a portion of her story, did not
+disconcert her.  To Lady Pennon and Lady Singleby, she was the brilliant
+Diana of her nominal luminary issuing from cloud.  Face and tongue, she
+was the same; and once in the stream, she soon gathered its current
+topics and scattered her arrowy phrases.  Lady Pennon ran about with
+them, declaring that the beautiful speaker, if ever down, was up, and up
+to her finest mark.  Mrs. Fryar-Gannett had then become the blazing
+regnant antisocial star; a distresser of domesticity, the magnetic
+attraction in the spirituous flames of that wild snapdragon bowl, called
+the Upper class; and she was angelically blonde, a straw-coloured Beauty.
+'A lovely wheat sheaf, if the head were ripe,' Diana said of her.
+
+'Threshed, says her fame, my dear,' Lady Pennon replied, otherwise
+allusive.
+
+'A wheatsheaf of contention for the bread of wind,' said Diana, thinking
+of foolish Sir Lukin; thoughtless of talking to a gossip.
+
+She would have shot a lighter dart, had she meant it to fly and fix.
+
+Proclaim, ye classics, what minor Goddess, or primal, Iris or Ate, sped
+straight away on wing to the empty wheatsheaf-ears of the golden-visaged
+Amabel Fryar-Gunnett, daughter of Demeter in the field to behold, of
+Aphrodite in her rosy incendiarism for the many of men; filling that
+pearly concave with a perversion of the uttered speech, such as never
+lady could have repeated, nor man, if less than a reaping harvester:
+which verily for women to hear, is to stamp a substantial damnatory
+verification upon the delivery of the saying:--
+
+'Mrs. Warwick says of you, that you're a bundle of straws for everybody
+and bread for nobody.'
+
+Or, stranger speculation, through what, and what number of conduits,
+curious, and variously colouring, did it reach the fair Amabel of the
+infant-in-cradle smile, in that deformation of the original utterance!
+To pursue the thing, would be to enter the subter-sensual perfumed
+caverns of a Romance of Fashionable Life, with no hope of coming back to
+light, other than by tail of lynx, like the great Arabian seaman, at the
+last page of the final chapter.  A prospectively popular narrative
+indeed! and coin to reward it, and applause.  But I am reminded that a
+story properly closed on the marriage of the heroine Constance and her
+young Minister of State, has no time for conjuring chemists' bouquet of
+aristocracy to lure the native taste.  When we have satisfied English
+sentiment, our task is done, in every branch of art, I hear: and it will
+account to posterity for the condition of the branches.  Those yet
+wakeful eccentrics interested in such a person as Diana, to the extent of
+remaining attentive till the curtain falls, demand of me to gather-up the
+threads concerning her: which my gardener sweeping his pile of dead
+leaves before the storm and night, advises me to do speedily.  But it
+happens that her resemblance to her sex and species of a civilized period
+plants the main threads in her bosom.  Rogues and a policeman, or a
+hurried change of front of all the actors, are not a part of our slow
+machinery.
+
+Nor is she to show herself to advantage.  Only those who read her woman's
+blood and character with the head, will care for Diana of the Crossways
+now that the knot of her history has been unravelled.  Some little love
+they must have for her likewise: and how it can be quickened on behalf of
+a woman who never sentimentalizes publicly, and has no dolly-dolly
+compliance, and muses on actual life, and fatigues with the exercise of
+brains, and is in sooth an alien: a princess of her kind and time, but a
+foreign one, speaking a language distinct from the mercantile,
+trafficking in ideas:--this is the problem.  For to be true to her, one
+cannot attempt at propitiation.  She said worse things of the world than
+that which was conveyed to the boxed ears of Mrs. Fryar-Gunnett.
+Accepting the war declared against her a second time, she performed the
+common mental trick in adversity of setting her personally known
+innocence to lessen her generally unknown error--but anticipating that
+this might become known, and the other not; and feeling that the motives
+of the acknowledged error had served to guard her from being the culprit
+of the charge she writhed under, she rushed out of a meditation
+compounded of mind and nerves, with derision of the world's notion of
+innocence and estimate of error.  It was a mood lasting through her stay
+in London, and longer, to the discomfort of one among her friends; and it
+was worthy of The Anti-climax Expedition, as she called it.
+
+For the rest, her demeanour to the old monster world exacting the
+servility of her, in repayment for its tolerating countenance, was
+faultless.  Emma beheld the introduction to Mrs. Warwick of his bride,
+by Mr. Percy Dacier.  She had watched their approach up the Ball-room,
+thinking, how differently would Redworth and Tony have looked.
+Differently, had it been Tony and Dacier: but Emma could not persuade
+herself of a possible harmony between them, save at the cost of Tony's
+expiation of the sin of the greater heart in a performance equivalent to
+Suttee.  Perfectly an English gentleman of the higher order, he seemed
+the effigy of a tombstone one, fixed upright, and civilly proud of his
+effigy bride.  So far, Emma considered them fitted.  She perceived his
+quick eye on her corner of the room; necessarily, for a man of his
+breeding, without a change of expression.  An emblem pertaining to her
+creed was on the heroine's neck; also dependant at her waist.  She was
+white from head to foot; a symbol of purity.  Her frail smile appeared
+deeply studied in purity.  Judging from her look and her reputation,
+Emma divined that the man was justly mated with a devious filmy
+sentimentalist, likely to 'fiddle harmonics on the sensual strings' for
+him at a mad rate in the years to come.  Such fiddling is indeed the
+peculiar diversion of the opulent of a fatly prosperous people; who take
+it, one may concede to them, for an inspired elimination of the higher
+notes of life: the very highest.  That saying of Tony's ripened with full
+significance to Emma now.  Not sensualism, but sham spiritualism, was the
+meaning; and however fine the notes, they come skilfully evoked of the
+under-brute in us.  Reasoning it so, she thought it a saying for the
+penetration of the most polished and deceptive of the later human masks.
+She had besides, be it owned, a triumph in conjuring a sentence of her
+friend's, like a sword's edge, to meet them; for she was boiling angrily
+at the ironical destiny which had given to those Two a beclouding of her
+beloved, whom she could have rebuked in turn for her insane caprice of
+passion.
+
+But when her beloved stood-up to greet Mrs. Percy Dacier, all idea save
+tremulous admiration of the valiant woman, who had been wounded nigh to
+death, passed from Emma's mind.  Diana tempered her queenliness to
+address the favoured lady with smiles and phrases of gentle warmth, of
+goodness of nature; and it became a halo rather than a personal eclipse
+that she cast.
+
+Emma looked at Dacier.  He wore the prescribed conventional air, subject
+in half a minute to a rapid blinking of the eyelids.  His wife could have
+been inimically imagined fascinated and dwindling.  A spot of colour came
+to her cheeks.  She likewise began to blink.
+
+The happy couple bowed, proceeding; and Emma had Dacier's back for a
+study.  We score on that flat slate of man, unattractive as it is to
+hostile observations, and unprotected, the device we choose.  Her
+harshest, was the positive thought that he had taken the woman best
+suited to him.  Doubtless, he was a man to prize the altar-candle
+above the lamp of day.  She fancied the back-view of him shrunken and
+straitened: perhaps a mere hostile fancy: though it was conceivable that
+he should desire as little of these meetings as possible.  Eclipses are
+not courted.
+
+The specially womanly exultation of Emma Dunstane in her friend's noble
+attitude, seeing how their sex had been struck to the dust for a trifling
+error, easily to be overlooked by a manful lover, and had asserted its
+dignity in physical and moral splendour, in self-mastery and benignness,
+was unshared by Diana.  As soon as the business of the expedition was
+over, her orders were issued for the sale of the lease of her house and
+all it contained.  'I would sell Danvers too,' she said, 'but the
+creature declines to be treated as merchandize.  It seems I have a
+faithful servant; very much like my life, not quite to my taste; the one
+thing out of the wreck!--with my dog!'
+
+Before quitting her house for the return to Copsley, she had to grant Mr.
+Alexander Hepburn, post-haste from his Caledonia, a private interview.
+She came out of it noticeably shattered.  Nothing was related to Emma,
+beyond the remark: 'I never knew till this morning the force of No in
+earnest.'  The weighty little word--woman's native watchdog and guardian,
+if she calls it to her aid in earnest--had encountered and withstood a
+fiery ancient host, astonished at its novel power of resistance.
+
+Emma contented herself with the result.  'Were you much supplicated?'
+
+'An Operatic Fourth-Act,' said Diana, by no means; feeling so flippantly
+as she spoke.
+
+She received, while under the impression of this man's, honest, if
+primitive, ardour of courtship, or effort to capture, a characteristic
+letter from Westlake, choicely phrased, containing presumeably an
+application for her hand, in the generous offer of his own.  Her reply to
+a pursuer of that sort was easy.  Comedy, after the barbaric attack,
+refreshed her wits and reliance on her natural fencing weapons.  To
+Westlake, the unwritten No was conveyed in a series of kindly ironic
+subterfuges, that, played it like an impish flea across the pages, just
+giving the bloom of the word; and rich smiles come to Emma's life in
+reading the dexterous composition: which, however, proved so thoroughly
+to Westlake's taste, that a second and a third exercise in the comedy of
+the negative had to be despatched to him from Copsley.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XL
+
+IN WHICH WE SEE NATURE MAKING OF A WOMAN A MAID AGAIN, AND A THRICE
+WHIMSICAL
+
+On their way from London, after leaving the station, the drive through
+the valley led them past a field, where cricketers were at work bowling
+and batting under a vertical sun: not a very comprehensible sight to
+ladies, whose practical tendencies, as observers of the other sex,
+incline them to question the gain of such an expenditure of energy.
+The dispersal of the alphabet over a printed page is not less perplexing
+to the illiterate.  As soon as Emma Dunstane discovered the Copsley head-
+gamekeeper at one wicket, and, actually, Thomas Redworth facing him, bat
+in hand, she sat up, greatly interested.  Sir Lukin stopped the carriage
+at the gate, and reminded his wife that it was the day of the year for
+the men of his estate to encounter a valley Eleven.  Redworth, like the
+good fellow he was, had come down by appointment in the morning out of
+London, to fill the number required, Copsley being weak this year.  Eight
+of their wickets had fallen for a lament able figure of twenty-nine runs;
+himself clean-bowled the first ball.  But Tom Redworth had got fast hold
+of his wicket, and already scored fifty to his bat.  'There! grand hit!'
+Sir Lukin cried, the ball flying hard at the rails.  'Once a cricketer,
+always a cricketer, if you've legs to fetch the runs.  And Pullen's not
+doing badly. His business is to stick.  We shall mark them a hundred
+yet.  I do hate a score on our side without the two 00's.'  He accounted
+for Redworth's mixed colours by telling the ladies he had lent him his
+flannel jacket; which, against black trousers, looked odd but not ill.
+
+Gradually the enthusiasm of the booth and bystanders converted the flying
+of a leather ball into a subject of honourable excitement.
+
+'And why are you doing nothing?' Sir Lukin was asked; and he explained:
+
+'My stumps are down: I'm married.'  He took his wife's hand prettily.
+
+Diana had a malicious prompting.  She smothered the wasp, and said:
+'Oh! look at that!'
+
+'Grand hit again!  Oh! good! good!' cried Sir Lukin, clapping to it,
+while the long-hit-off ran spinning his legs into one for an impossible
+catch; and the batsmen were running and stretching bats, and the ball
+flying away, flying back, and others after it, and still the batsmen
+running, till it seemed that the ball had escaped control and was leading
+the fielders on a coltish innings of its own, defiant of bowlers.
+
+Diana said merrily: 'Bravo our side!'
+
+'Bravo, old Tom Redworth'; rejoined Sir Lukin.  'Four, and a three!  And
+capital weather, haven't we: Hope we shall have same sort day next month
+--return match, my ground.  I've seen Tom Redworth score--old days--over
+two hundred t' his bat.  And he used to bowl too.  But bowling wants
+practice.  And, Emmy, look at the old fellows lining the booth, pipe in
+mouth and cheering.  They do enjoy a day like this.  We'll have a supper
+for fifty at Copsley's:--it's fun.  By Jove!  we must have reached up to
+near the hundred.'
+
+He commissioned a neighbouring boy to hie to the booth for the latest
+figures, and his emissary taught lightning a lesson.
+
+Diana praised the little fellow.
+
+'Yes, he's a real English boy,' said Emma.
+
+'We 've thousands of 'em, thousands, ready to your hand,' exclaimed Sir
+Lukin, 'and a confounded Radicalized country .  .  .'  he murmured
+gloomily of 'lets us be kicked!  .  .  .  any amount of insult, meek as
+gruel! . . . making of the finest army the world has ever seen!  You saw
+the papers this morning?  Good heaven!  how a nation with an atom of
+self-respect can go on standing that sort of bullying from foreigners!
+We do.  We're insulted and we're threatened, and we call for a hymn!--
+Now then, my man, what is it?'
+
+The boy had flown back.  'Ninety-two marked, sir; ninety-nine runs; one
+more for the hundred.'
+
+'Well reckoned; and mind you're up at Copsley for the return match.--
+And Tom Redworth says, they may bite their thumbs to the bone--they don't
+hurt us.  I tell him, he has no sense of national pride.  He says, we're
+not prepared for war: We never are!  And whose the fault?  Says, we're a
+peaceful people, but 'ware who touches us!  He doesn't feel a kick.--Oh!
+clever snick!  Hurrah for the hundred!--Two-three.  No, don't force the
+running, you fools!--though they 're wild with the ball: ha!--no?--all
+right!' The wicket stood.  Hurrah!
+
+The heat of the noonday sun compelled the ladies to drive on.
+
+'Enthusiasm has the privilege of not knowing monotony,' said Emma.  'He
+looks well in flannels.'
+
+'Yes, he does,' Diana replied, aware of the reddening despite her having
+spoken so simply.  'I think the chief advantage men have over us is in
+their amusements.'
+
+'Their recreations.'
+
+'That is the better word.'  Diana fanned her cheeks and said she was
+warm.  'I mean, the permanent advantage.  For you see that age does not
+affect them.'
+
+'Tom Redworth is not a patriarch, my dear.'
+
+'Well, he is what would be called mature.'
+
+'He can't be more than thirty-two or three; and that, for a man of his
+constitution, means youth.'
+
+'Well, I can imagine him a patriarch playing cricket.'
+
+'I should imagine you imagine the possible chances.  He is the father who
+would play with his boys.'
+
+'And lock up his girls in the nursery.'  Diana murmured of the
+extraordinary heat.
+
+Emma begged her to remember her heterodox views of the education for
+girls.
+
+'He bats admirably,' said Diana.  'I wish I could bat half as well.'
+
+'Your batting is with the tongue.'
+
+'Not so good.  And a solid bat, or bludgeon, to defend the poor stumps,
+is surer.  But there is the difference of cricket:--when your stumps are
+down, you are idle, at leisure; not a miserable prisoner.'
+
+'Supposing all marriages miserable.'
+
+'To the mind of me,' said Diana, and observed Emma's rather saddened
+eyelids for a proof that schemes to rob her of dear liberty were
+certainly planned.
+
+They conversed of expeditions to Redworth's Berkshire mansion, and to The
+Crossways, untenanted at the moment, as he had informed Emma, who fancied
+it would please Tony to pass a night in the house she loved; but as he
+was to be of the party she coldly acquiesced.
+
+The woman of flesh refuses pliancy when we want it of her, and will not,
+until it is her good pleasure, be bent to the development called a
+climax, as the puppet-woman, mother of Fiction and darling of the
+multitude! ever amiably does, at a hint of the Nuptial Chapter.  Diana in
+addition sustained the weight of brains.  Neither with waxen optics nor
+with subservient jointings did she go through her pathways of the world.
+Her direct individuality rejected the performance of simpleton, and her
+lively blood, the warmer for its containment quickened her to penetrate
+things and natures; and if as yet, in justness to the loyal male friend,
+she forbore to name him conspirator, she read both him and Emma, whose
+inner bosom was revealed to her, without an effort to see.  But her
+characteristic chasteness of mind, not coldness of the 'blood,--which had
+supported an arduous conflict, past all existing rights closely to
+depict, and which barbed her to pierce to the wishes threatening her
+freedom, deceived her now to think her flaming blushes came of her
+relentless divination on behalf of her recovered treasure: whereby the
+clear reading of others distracted the view of herself.  For one may be
+the cleverest alive, and still hoodwinked while blood is young and warm.
+
+The perpetuity of the contrast presented to her reflections, of
+Redworth's healthy, open, practical, cheering life, and her own
+freakishly interwinding, darkly penetrative, simulacrum of a life,
+cheerless as well as useless, forced her humiliated consciousness by
+degrees, in spite of pride, to the knowledge that she was engaged in a
+struggle with him; and that he was the stronger;--it might be, the
+worthier: she thought him the handsomer.  He throve to the light of day,
+and she spun a silly web that meshed her in her intricacies.  Her
+intuition of Emma's wishes led to this; he was constantly before her.
+She tried to laugh at the image of the concrete cricketer, half-
+flannelled, and red of face: the 'lucky calculator,' as she named him to
+Emma, who shook her head, and sighed.  The abstract, healthful and
+powerful man, able to play besides profitably working, defied those poor
+efforts.  Consequently, at once she sent up a bubble to the skies, where
+it became a spheral realm, of far too fine an atmosphere for men to
+breathe in it; and thither she transported herself at will, whenever the
+contrast, with its accompanying menace of a tyrannic subjugation,
+overshadowed her.  In the above, the kingdom composed of her shattered
+romance of life and her present aspirings, she was free and safe.
+Nothing touched her there--nothing that Redworth did.  She could not have
+admitted there her ideal of a hero.  It was the sublimation of a virgin's
+conception of life, better fortified against the enemy.  She peopled it
+with souls of the great and pure, gave it illimitable horizons, dreamy
+nooks, ravishing landscapes, melodies of the poets of music.  Higher and
+more-celestial than the Salvatore, it was likewise, now she could assure
+herself serenely, independent of the horrid blood-emotions.  Living up
+there, she had not a feeling.
+
+The natural result of this habit of ascending to a superlunary home,
+was the loss of an exact sense of how she was behaving below.  At the
+Berkshire mansion, she wore a supercilious air, almost as icy as she
+accused the place of being.  Emma knew she must have seen in the library
+a row of her literary ventures, exquisitely bound; but there was no
+allusion to the books.  Mary Paynham's portrait of Mrs. Warwick hung
+staring over the fireplace, and was criticized, as though its occupancy
+of that position had no significance.
+
+'He thinks she has a streak of genius,' Diana said to Emma.
+
+'It may be shown in time,' Emma replied, for a comment on the work.  'He
+should know, for the Spanish pictures are noble acquisitions.'
+
+'They are, doubtless, good investments.'
+
+He had been foolish enough to say, in Diana's hearing, that he considered
+the purchase of the Berkshire estate a good investment.  It had not yet a
+name.  She suggested various titles for Emma to propose: 'The Funds'; or
+'Capital Towers'; or 'Dividend Manor'; or 'Railholm'; blind to the
+evidence of inflicting pain.  Emma, from what she had guess concerning
+the purchaser of The Crossways, apprehended a discovery there which might
+make Tony's treatment of him unkinder, seeing that she appeared actuated
+contrariously; and only her invalid's new happiness in the small
+excursions she was capable of taking to a definite spot, of some homely
+attractiveness, moved her to follow her own proposal for the journey.
+Diana pleaded urgently, childishly in tone, to have Arthur Rhodes with
+them, 'so as to be sure of a sympathetic companion for a walk on the
+Downs.'  At The Crossways, they were soon aware that Mr. Redworth's
+domestics were in attendance to serve them.  Manifestly the house was his
+property, and not much of an investment!  The principal bed-room, her
+father's once, and her own, devoted now to Emma's use, appalled her with
+a resemblance to her London room.  She had noticed some of her furniture
+at 'Dividend Manor,' and chosen to consider it in the light of a bargain
+from a purchase at the sale of her goods.  Here was her bed, her writing-
+table, her chair of authorship, desks, books, ornaments, water-colour
+sketches.  And the drawing-room was fitted with her brackets and
+etageres, holding every knickknack she had possessed and scattered, small
+bronzes, antiques, ivory junks, quaint ivory figures Chinese and
+Japanese, bits of porcelain, silver incense-urns, dozens of dainty
+sundries.  She had a shamed curiosity to spy for an omission of one of
+them; all were there.  The Crossways had been turned into a trap.
+
+Her reply to this blunt wooing, conspired, she felt justifled in
+thinking, between him and Emma, was emphatic in muteness.  She treated it
+as if unobserved.  At night, in bed, the scene of his mission from Emma
+to her under this roof, barred her customary ascent to her planetary
+kingdom.  Next day she took Arthur after breakfast for a walk on the
+Downs and remained absent till ten minutes before the hour of dinner.
+As to that young gentleman, he was near to being caressed in public.
+Arthur's opinions, his good sayings, were quoted; his excellent
+companionship on really poetical walks, and perfect sympathy, praised to
+his face.  Challenged by her initiative to a kind of language that threw
+Redworth out, he declaimed: 'We pace with some who make young morning
+stale.'
+
+'Oh!  stale as peel of fruit long since consumed,' she chimed.
+
+And go they proceeded; and they laughed, Emma smiled a little, Redworth
+did the same beneath one of his questioning frowns--a sort of fatherly
+grimace.
+
+A suspicion that this man, when infatuated, was able to practise the
+absurdest benevolence, the burlesque of chivalry, as a man-admiring sex
+esteems it, stirred very naughty depths of the woman in Diana, labouring
+under her perverted mood.  She put him to proof, for the chance of arming
+her wickedest to despise him.  Arthur was petted, consulted, cited,
+flattered all round; all but caressed.  She played, with a reserve, the
+maturish young woman smitten by an adorable youth; and enjoyed doing it
+because she hoped for a visible effect--more paternal benevolence--and
+could do it so dispassionately.  Coquettry, Emma thought, was most
+unworthily shown; and it was of the worst description.  Innocent of
+conspiracy, she had seen the array of Tony's lost household treasures
+she wondered at a heartlessness that would not even utter common thanks
+to the friendly man for the compliment of prizing her portrait and the
+things she had owned; and there seemed an effort to wound him.
+
+The invalided woman, charitable with allowances for her erratic husband,
+could offer none for the woman of a long widowhood, that had become a
+trebly sensitive maidenhood; abashed by her knowledge of the world,
+animated by her abounding blood; cherishing her new freedom, dreading the
+menacer; feeling that though she held the citadel, she was daily less
+sure of its foundations, and that her hope of some last romance in life
+was going; for in him shone not a glimpse.  He appeared to Diana as a
+fatal power, attracting her without sympathy, benevolently overcoming:
+one of those good men, strong men, who subdue and do not kindle.  The
+enthralment revolted a nature capable of accepting subjection only by
+burning.  In return for his moral excellence, she gave him the moral
+sentiments: esteem, gratitude, abstract admiration, perfect faith.  But
+the man?  She could not now say she had never been loved; and a flood
+of tenderness rose in her bosom, swelling from springs that she had
+previously reproved with a desperate severity: the unhappy, unsatisfied
+yearning to be more than loved, to love.  It was alive, out of the wreck
+of its first trial.  This, the secret of her natural frailty, was bitter
+to her pride: chastely-minded as she was, it whelmed her.  And then her
+comic imagination pictured Redworth dramatically making love.  And to a
+widow!  It proved him to be senseless of romance.  Poetic men take aim at
+maidens.  His devotedness to a widow was charged against him by the
+widow's shudder at antecedents distasteful to her soul, a discolouration
+of her life.  She wished to look entirely forward, as upon a world washed
+clear of night, not to be cast back on her antecedents by practical
+wooings or words of love; to live spiritually; free of the shower at her
+eyelids attendant on any idea of her loving.  The woman who talked of the
+sentimentalist's 'fiddling harmonics,' herself stressed the material
+chords, in her attempt to escape out of herself and away from her
+pursuer.
+
+Meanwhile she was as little conscious of what she was doing as of how she
+appeared.  Arthur went about with the moony air of surcharged sweetness,
+and a speculation on it, alternately tiptoe and prostrate.  More of her
+intoxicating wine was administered to him, in utter thoughtlessness of
+consequences to one who was but a boy and a friend, almost of her own
+rearing.  She told Emma, when leaving The Crossways, that she had no
+desire to look on the place again: she wondered at Mr. Redworth's liking
+such a solitude.  In truth, the look back on it let her perceive that her
+husband haunted it, and disfigured the man, of real generosity, as her
+heart confessed, but whom she accused of a lack of prescient delicacy,
+for not knowing she would and must be haunted there.  Blaming him, her
+fountain of colour shot up, at a murmur of her unjustness and the poor
+man's hopes.
+
+A week later, the youth she publicly named 'her Arthur' came down to
+Copsley with news of his having been recommended by Mr. Redworth for the
+post of secretary to an old Whig nobleman famous for his patronage of men
+of letters.  And besides, he expected to inherit, he said, and gazed in a
+way to sharpen her instincts.  The wine he had drunk of late from her
+flowing vintage was in his eyes.  They were on their usual rambles out
+along the heights.  'Accept, by all means, and thank Mr. Redworth,' said
+she, speeding her tongue to intercept him.  'Literature is a good stick
+and a bad horse.  Indeed, I ought to know.  You can always write; I hope
+you will.'
+
+She stepped fast, hearing: 'Mrs. Warwick--Diana!  May I take your hand?'
+
+This was her pretty piece of work!  'Why should you?  If you speak my
+Christian name, no: you forfeit any pretext.  And pray, don't loiter.
+We are going at the pace of the firm of Potter and Dawdle, and you know
+they never got their shutters down till it was time to put them up
+again.'
+
+Nimble-footed as she was, she pressed ahead too fleetly for amorous
+eloquence to have a chance.  She heard 'Diana!' twice, through the
+rattling of her discourse and flapping of her dress.
+
+'Christian names are coin that seem to have an indifferent valuation of
+the property they claim,' she said in the Copsley garden; 'and as for
+hands, at meeting and parting, here is the friendliest you could have.
+Only don't look rueful.  My dear Arthur, spare me that, or I shall blame
+myself horribly.'
+
+His chance had gone, and he composed his face.  No hope in speaking had
+nerved him; merely the passion to speak.  Diana understood the state, and
+pitied the naturally modest young fellow, and chafed at herself as a
+senseless incendiary, who did mischief right and left, from seeking to
+shun the apparently inevitable.  A sidethought intruded, that he would
+have done his wooing poetically--not in the burly storm, or bull-Saxon,
+she apprehended.  Supposing it imperative with her to choose?  She looked
+up, and the bird of broader wing darkened the whole sky, bidding her know
+that she had no choice.
+
+Emma was requested to make Mr. Redworth acquainted with her story, all of
+it:--'So that this exalted friendship of his may be shaken to a common
+level.  He has an unbearably high estimate of me, and it hurts me.  Tell
+him all; and more than even you have known:--but for his coming to me,
+on the eve of your passing under the surgeon's hands, I should have gone
+--flung the world my glove!  A matter of minutes.  Ten minutes later!
+The train was to start for France at eight, and I was awaited.  I have to
+thank heaven that the man was one of those who can strike icily.  Tell
+Mr. Redworth what I say.  You two converse upon every subject.  One may
+be too loftily respected--in my case.  By and by--for he is a tolerant
+reader of life and women, I think--we shall be humdrum friends of the
+lasting order.'
+
+Emma's cheeks were as red as Diana's.  'I fancy Tom Redworth has not much
+to learn concerning any person he cares for,' she said.  'You like him?
+I have lost touch of you, my dear, and ask.'
+
+'I like him: that I can say.  He is everything I am not.  But now I am
+free, the sense of being undeservedly over-esteemed imposes fetters,
+and I don't like them.  I have been called a Beauty.  Rightly or other,
+I have had a Beauty's career; and a curious caged beast's life I have
+found it.  Will you promise me to speak to him?  And also, thank him for
+helping Arthur Rhodes to a situation.'
+
+At this, the tears fell from her.  And so enigmatical had she grown to
+Emma, that her bosom friend took them for a confessed attachment to the
+youth.
+
+Diana's wretched emotion shamed her from putting any inquiries whether
+Redworth had been told.  He came repeatedly, and showed no change of
+face, always continuing in the form of huge hovering griffin; until an
+idea, instead of the monster bird, struck her.  Might she not, after all,
+be cowering under imagination?  The very maidenly idea wakened her
+womanliness--to reproach her remainder of pride, not to see more
+accurately.  It was the reason why she resolved, against Emma's extreme
+entreaties, to take lodgings in the South valley below the heights, where
+she could be independent of fancies and perpetual visitors, but near her
+beloved at any summons of urgency; which Emma would not habitually send
+because of the coming of a particular gentleman.  Dresses were left at
+Copsley for dining and sleeping there upon occasion, and poor Danvers,
+despairing over the riddle of her mistress, was condemned to the
+melancholy descent.
+
+'It's my belief,' she confided to Lady Dunstane's maid Bartlett, 'she'll
+hate men all her life after that Mr. Dacier.'
+
+If women were deceived, and the riddle deceived herself, there is excuse
+for a plain man like Redworth in not having the slightest clue to the
+daily shifting feminine maze he beheld.  The strange thing was, that
+during her maiden time she had never been shifty or flighty, invariably
+limpid and direct.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLI
+
+CONTAINS A REVELATION OF THE ORIGIN OF THE TIGRESS IN DIANA
+
+An afternoon of high summer blazed over London through the City's awning
+of smoke, and the three classes of the population, relaxed by the
+weariful engagement with what to them was a fruitless heat, were
+severally bathing their ideas in dreams of the contrast possible to
+embrace: breezy seas or moors, aerial Alps, cool beer.  The latter, if
+confessedly the lower comfort, is the readier at command; and Thomas
+Redworth, whose perspiring frame was directing his inward vision to fly
+for solace to a trim new yacht, built on his lines, beckoning from
+Southampton Water, had some of the amusement proper to things plucked off
+the levels, in the conversation of a couple of journeymen close ahead of
+him, as he made his way from a quiet street of brokers' offices to a City
+Bank.  One asked the other if he had ever tried any of that cold stuff
+they were now selling out of barrows, with cream.  His companion
+answered, that he had not got much opinion of stuff of the sort; and what
+was it like?
+
+'Well, it's cheap, it ain't bad; it's cooling.  But it ain't refreshing.'
+
+'Just what I reckoned all that newfangle rubbish.'
+
+Without a consultation, the conservatives in beverage filed with a smart
+turn about, worthy of veterans at parade on the drill-ground, into a
+public-house; and a dialogue chiefly remarkable for absence of point,
+furnished matter to the politician's head of the hearer.  Provided that
+their beer was unadulterated!  Beer they would have; and why not, in
+weather like this?  But how to make the publican honest!  And he was not
+the only trickster preying on the multitudinous poor copper crowd,
+rightly to be protected by the silver and the golden.  Revelations of the
+arts practised to plump them with raw-earth and minerals in the guise of
+nourishment, had recently knocked at the door of the general conscience
+and obtained a civil reply from the footman.  Repulsive as the thought
+was to one still holding to Whiggish Liberalism, though flying various
+Radical kites, he was caught by the decisive ultratorrent, and whirled
+to amid the necessity for the interference of the State, to stop
+the poisoning of the poor.  Upper classes have never legislated
+systematically in their interests; and quid .  .  .  rabidae tradis ovile
+lupae?  says one of the multitude.  We may be seeing fangs of wolves
+where fleeces waxed.  The State that makes it a vital principle to
+concern itself with the helpless poor, meets instead of waiting for
+Democracy; which is a perilous flood but when it is dammed.  Or else, in
+course of time, luxurious yachting, my friend, will encounter other reefs
+and breakers than briny ocean's!  Capital, whereat Diana Warwick aimed
+her superbest sneer, has its instant duties.  She theorized on the side
+of poverty, and might do so: he had no right to be theorizing on the side
+of riches.  Across St. George's Channel, the cry for humanity in Capital
+was an agony.  He ought to be there, doing, not cogitating.  The post of
+Irish Secretary must be won by real service founded on absolute local
+knowledge.  Yes, and sympathy, if you like; but sympathy is for proving,
+not prating .  .  .  .
+
+These were the meditations of a man in love; veins, arteries, headpiece
+in love, and constantly brooding at a solitary height over the beautiful
+coveted object; only too bewildered by her multifarious evanescent
+feminine evasions, as of colours on a ruffle water, to think of pouncing
+for he could do nothing to soften, nothing that seemed to please her: and
+all the while, the motive of her mind impelled him in reflection beyond
+practicable limits: even pointing him to apt quotations!  Either he
+thought within her thoughts, or his own were at her disposal.  Nor was it
+sufficient for him to be sensible of her influence, to restrain the
+impetus he took from her.  He had already wedded her morally, and much
+that he did, as well as whatever he debated, came of Diana; more than if
+they had been coupled, when his downright practical good sense could have
+spoken.  She held him suspended, swaying him in that posture; and he was
+not a whit ashamed of it.  The beloved woman was throned on the very
+highest of the man.
+
+Furthermore, not being encouraged, he had his peculiar reason for delay,
+though now he could offer her wealth.  She had once in his hearing
+derided the unpleasant hiss of the ungainly English matron's title of
+Mrs. There was no harm in the accustomed title, to his taste; but she
+disliking it, he did the same, on her special behalf; and the prospect,
+funereally draped, of a title sweeter-sounding to her ears, was above his
+horizon.  Bear in mind, that he underwent the reverse of encouragement.
+Any small thing to please her was magnified, and the anticipation of it
+nerved the modest hopes of one who deemed himself and any man alive
+deeply her inferior.
+
+Such was the mood of the lover condemned to hear another malignant
+scandal defiling the name of the woman he worshipped.  Sir Lukin
+Dunstane, extremely hurried, bumped him on the lower step of the busy
+Bank, and said:
+
+'Pardon!' and 'Ha!  Redwarth!  making money?'
+
+'Why, what are you up to down here?' he was asked, and he answered:
+'Down to the Tower, to an officer quartered there.  Not bad quarters,
+but an infernal distance.  Business.'
+
+Having cloaked his expedition to the distance with the comprehensive
+word, he repeated it; by which he feared he had rendered it too
+significant, and he said: 'No, no; nothing particular'; and that caused
+the secret he contained to swell in his breast rebelliously, informing
+the candid creature of the fact of his hating to lie: whereupon thus he
+poured himself out, in the quieter bustle of an alley, off the main
+thoroughfare.  'You're a friend of hers.  I 'm sure you care for her
+reputation; you 're an old friend of hers, and she's my wife's dearest
+friend; and I'm fond of her too; and I ought to be, and ought to know,
+and do know:--pure?  Strike off my fist if there's a spot on her
+character!  And a scoundrel like that fellow Wroxeter!  Damnedest rage
+I ever was in!--Swears .  .  .  down at Lockton .  .  .  when she was a
+girl.  Why, Redworth, I can tell you, when Diana Warwick was a girl!'
+
+Redworth stopped him.  'Did he say it in your presence?'
+
+Sir Lukin was drawn-up by the harsh question.  'Well, no; not exactly.'
+He tried to hesitate, but he was in the hot vein of a confidence and he
+wanted advice.  'The cur said it to a woman--hang the woman!  And she
+hates Diana Warwick: I can't tell why--a regular snake's hate.  By Jove!
+how women carp hate!'
+
+'Who is the woman?' said Redworth.
+
+Sir Lukin complained of the mob at his elbows.  'I don't like mentioning
+names here.'
+
+A convenient open door of offices invited him to drag his receptacle, and
+possible counsellor, into the passage, where immediately he bethought him
+of a postponement of the distinct communication; but the vein was too
+hot.  'I say, Redworth, I wish you'd dine with me.  Let's drive up to my
+Club.--Very well, two words.  And I warn you, I shall call him out, and
+make it appear it 's about another woman, who'll like nothing so much, if
+I know the Jezebel.  Some women are hussies, let 'em be handsome as
+houris.  And she's a fire-ship; by heaven, she is!  Come, you're a friend
+of my wife's, but you're a man of the world and my friend, and you know
+how fellows are tempted, Tom Redworth.--Cur though he is, he's likely to
+step out and receive a lesson.--Well, he's the favoured cavalier for the
+present .  .  .  h'm .  .  .  Fryar-Gannett.  Swears he told her,
+circumstantially; and it was down at Lockton, when Diana Warwick was a
+girl.  Swears she'll spit her venom at her, so that Diana Warwick shan't
+hold her head up in London Society, what with that cur Wroxeter, Old
+Dannisburgh, and Dacier.  And it does count a list, doesn't it?  confound
+the handsome hag!  She's jealous of a dark rival.  I've been down to
+Colonel Hartswood at the Tower, and he thinks Wroxeter deserves
+horsewhipping, and we may manage it.  I know you 're dead against
+duelling; and so am I, on my honour.  But you see there are cases where
+a lady must be protected; and anything new, left to circulate against a
+lady who has been talked of twice--Oh, by Jove!  it must be stopped.  If
+she has a male friend on earth, it must be stopped on the spot.'
+
+Redworth eyed Sir Lukin curiously through his wrath.
+
+'We'll drive up to your Club,' he said.
+
+'Hartswood dines with me this evening, to confer,' rejoined Sir Lukin.
+'Will you meet him?'
+
+'I can't,' said Redworth, 'I have to see a lady, whose affairs I have
+been attending to in the City; and I 'm engaged for the evening.  You
+perceive, my good fellow,' he resumed, as they rolled along, 'this is a
+delicate business.  You have to consider your wife.  Mrs. Warwick's, name
+won't come up, but another woman's will.'
+
+'I meet Wroxeter at a gambling-house he frequents, and publicly call him
+cheat--slap his face, if need be.'
+
+'Sure to!' repeated Redworth.  'No stupid pretext will quash the woman's
+name.  Now, such a thing as a duel would give pain enough.'
+
+'Of course; I understand,' Sir Lukin nodded his clear comprehension.
+'But what is it you advise, to trounce the scoundrel, and silence him?'
+
+'Leave it to me for a day.  Let me have your word that you won't take a
+step: positively--neither you nor Colonel Hartswood.  I'll see you by
+appointment at your Club.'  Redworth looked up over the chimneys.
+'We 're going to have a storm and a gale, I can tell you.'
+
+'Gale and storm!' cried Sir Lukin; 'what has that got to do with it?'
+
+'Think of something else for, a time.'
+
+'And that brute of a woman--deuced handsome she is!--if you care for fair
+women, Redworth:--she's a Venus, jumped slap out of the waves, and the
+Devil for sire--that you learn: running about, sowing her lies.  She's a
+yellow witch.  Oh!  but she's a shameless minx.  And a black-leg cur like
+Wroxeter!  Any woman intimate with a fellow like that, stamps herself.
+I loathe her.  Sort of woman who swears in the morning you're the only
+man on earth; and next day--that evening-engaged!--fee to Polly Hopkins
+--and it's a gentleman, a nobleman, my lord!--been going on behind your
+back half the season!--and she isn't hissed when she abuses a lady, a
+saint in comparison!  You know the world, old fellow:--Brighton,
+Richmond, visits to a friend as deep in the bog.  How Fryar-Gunnett--
+a man, after all--can stand it!  And drives of an afternoon for an
+airing-by heaven!  You're out of that mess, Redworth: not much taste for
+the sex; and you're right, you're lucky.  Upon my word, the corruption of
+society in the present day is awful; it's appalling.--I rattled at her:
+and oh! dear me, perks on her hind heels and defies me to prove: and
+she's no pretender, but hopes she's as good as any of my "chaste Dianas."
+My dear old friend, it's when you come upon women of that kind you have a
+sickener.  And I'm bound by the best there is in a man-honour, gratitude,
+all the' list--to defend Diana Warwick.'
+
+'So, you see, for your wife's sake, your name can't be hung on a woman of
+that kind,' said Redworth.  'I'll call here the day after to-morrow at
+three P.M.'
+
+Sir Lukin descended and vainly pressed Redworth to run up into his Club
+for refreshment.  Said he roguishly:
+
+'Who 's the lady?'
+
+The tone threw Redworth on his frankness.
+
+'The lady I 've been doing business for in the City, is Miss Paynham.'
+
+'I saw her once at Copsley; good-looking.  Cleverish?'
+
+'She has ability.'
+
+Entering his Club, Sir Lukin was accosted in the reading-room by a
+cavalry officer, a Colonel Launay, an old Harrovian, who stood at the
+window and asked him whether it was not Tom Redworth in the cab.
+Another, of the same School, standing squared before a sheet of one of
+the evening newspapers, heard the name and joined them, saying: 'Tom
+Redworth is going to be married, some fellow told me.'
+
+'He'll make a deuced good husband to any woman--if it's true,' said Sir
+Lukin, with Miss Paynham ringing in his head.  'He's a cold-blooded old
+boy, and likes women for their intellects.'
+
+Colonel Launay hummed in meditative emphasis.  He stared at vacancy with
+a tranced eye, and turning a similar gaze on Sir Lukin, as if through
+him, burst out: 'Oh, by George, I say, what a hugging that woman 'll
+get!'
+
+The cocking of ears and queries of Sir Lukin put him to the test of his
+right to the remark; for it sounded of occult acquaintance with
+interesting subterranean facts; and there was a communication, in brief
+syllables and the dot language, crudely masculine.  Immensely surprised,
+Sir Lukin exclaimed: 'Of course!  when fellows live quietly and are
+careful of themselves.  Ah!  you may think you know a man for years, and
+you don't: you don't know more than an inch or two of him.  Why, of
+course, Tom Redworth would be uxorious--the very man!  And tell us what
+has become of the Firefly now?  One never sees her.  Didn't complain?'
+
+'Very much the contrary.'
+
+Both gentlemen were grave, believing their knowledge in the subterranean
+world of a wealthy city to give them a positive cognizance of female
+humanity; and the substance of Colonel Launay's communication had its
+impressiveness for them.
+
+'Well, it's a turn right-about-face for me,' said Sir Lukin.  'What a
+world we live in!  I fancy I've hit on the woman he means to marry;--had
+an idea of another woman once; but he's one of your friendly fellows with
+women.  That's how it was I took him for a fish.  Great mistake, I admit.
+But Tom Redworth 's a man of morals after all; and when those men do
+break loose for a plunge--ha!  Have you ever boxed with him?  Well, he
+keeps himself in training, I can tell you.'
+
+Sir Lukin's round of visits drew him at night to Lady Singleby's, where
+he sighted the identical young lady of his thoughts, Miss Paynham,
+temporarily a guest of the house; and he talked to her of Redworth,
+and had the satisfaction to spy a blush, a rageing blush: which avowal
+presented her to his view as an exceedingly good-looking girl; so that
+he began mentally to praise Redworth for a manly superiority to small
+trifles and the world's tattle.
+
+'You saw him to-day,' he said.
+
+She answered: 'Yes.  He goes down to Copsley tomorrow.'
+
+'I think not,' said Sir Lukin.'
+
+'I have it from him.'  She closed her eyelids in speaking.
+
+'He and I have some rather serious business in town.'
+
+'Serious?'
+
+'Don't be alarmed: not concerning him.'
+
+'Whom, then?  You have told me so much--I have a right to know.'
+
+'Not an atom of danger, I assure you?'
+
+'It concerns Mrs. Warwick!' said she.
+
+Sir Lukin thought the guess extraordinary.  He preserved an impenetrable
+air.  But he had spoken enough to set that giddy head spinning.
+
+Nowhere during the night was Mrs. Fryar-Gannett visible.  Earlier than
+usual, she was riding next day in the Row, alone for perhaps two minutes,
+and Sir Lukin passed her, formally saluting.  He could not help the look
+behind him, she sat so bewitchingly on horseback!  He looked, and behold,
+her riding-whip was raised erect from the elbow.  It was his horse that
+wheeled; compulsorily he was borne at a short canter to her side.
+
+'Your commands?'
+
+The handsome Amabel threw him a sombre glance from the corners of her
+uplifted eyelids; and snakish he felt it; but her colour and the line of
+her face went well with sullenness; and, her arts of fascination cast
+aside, she fascinated him more in seeming homelier, girlish.  If the
+trial of her beauty of a woman in a temper can bear the strain, she has
+attractive lures indeed; irresistible to the amorous idler: and when, in
+addition, being the guilty person, she plays the injured, her show of
+temper on the taking face pitches him into perplexity with his own
+emotions, creating a desire to strike and be stricken, howl and set
+howling, which is of the happiest augury for tender reconcilement,
+on the terms of the gentleman on his kneecap.
+
+'You've been doing a pretty thing!' she said, and briefly she named her
+house and half an hour, and flew.  Sir Lukin was left to admire the
+figure of the horsewoman.  Really, her figure had an air of vindicating
+her successfully, except for the poison she spat at Diana Warwick.  And
+what pretty thing had he been doing?  He reviewed dozens of speculations
+until the impossibility of seizing one determined him to go to Mrs.
+Fryar-Gunnett at the end of the half-hour--'Just to see what these women
+have to say for themselves.'
+
+Some big advance drops of Redworth's thunderstorm drawing gloomily
+overhead, warned him to be quick and get his horse into stables.
+Dismounted, the sensational man was irresolute, suspecting a female trap.
+But curiosity, combined with the instinctive turning of his nose in the
+direction of the lady's house, led him thither, to an accompaniment of
+celestial growls, which impressed him, judging by that naughty-girl face
+of hers and the woman's tongue she had, as a likely prelude to the scene
+to come below.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLII
+
+THE PENULTIMATE: SHOWING A FINAL STRUGGLE FOR LIBERTY AND RUN INTO
+HARNESS
+
+The prophet of the storm had forgotten his prediction; which, however,
+was of small concern to him, apart from the ducking he received midway
+between the valley and the heights of Copsley; whither he was bound,
+on a mission so serious that, according to his custom in such instances,
+he chose to take counsel of his active legs: an adviseable course when
+the brain wants clearing and the heart fortifying.  Diana's face was
+clearly before him through the deluge; now in ogle features, the dimple
+running from her mouth, the dark bright eyes and cut of eyelids, and
+nostrils alive under their lightning; now inkier whole radiant smile, or
+musefully listening, nursing a thought.  Or she was obscured, and he felt
+the face.  The individuality of it had him by the heart, beyond his
+powers of visioning.  On his arrival, he stood in the hall, adrip like
+one of the trees of the lawn, laughing at Lady Dunstane's anxious
+exclamations.  His portmanteau had come and he was expected; she hurried
+out at the first ringing of the bell, to greet and reproach him for
+walking in such weather.
+
+'Diana has left me,' she said, when he reappeared in dry clothing.
+'We are neighbours; she has taken cottage-lodgings at Selshall, about an
+hour's walk:--one of her wild dreams of independence.  Are you
+disappointed?'
+
+'I am,' Redworth confessed.
+
+Emma coloured.  'She requires an immense deal of humouring at present.
+The fit will wear off; only we must wait for it.  Any menace to her
+precious liberty makes her prickly.  She is passing the day with the
+Pettigrews, who have taken a place near her village for a month.  She
+promised to dine and sleep here, if she returned in time.  What is your
+news?'
+
+'Nothing; the world wags on.'
+
+'You have nothing special to tell her?'
+
+'Nothing'; he hummed; 'nothing, I fancy, that she does not know.'
+
+'You said you were disappointed.'
+
+'It's always a pleasure to see her.'
+
+'Even in her worst moods, I find it so.'
+
+'Oh! moods!' quoth Redworth.
+
+'My friend, they are to be reckoned, with women.'
+
+'Certainly; what I meant was, that I don't count them against women.'
+
+'Good: but my meaning was .  .  .  I think I remember your once comparing
+them and the weather; and you spoke of the "one point more variable in
+women."  You may forestall your storms.  There is no calculating the
+effect of a few little words at a wrong season.'
+
+'With women!  I suppose not.  I have no pretension to a knowledge of the
+sex.'
+
+Emma imagined she had spoken plainly enough, if he had immediate designs;
+and she was not sure of that, and wished rather to shun his confidences
+while Tony was in her young widowhood, revelling in her joy of liberty.
+By and by, was her thought: perhaps next year.  She dreaded Tony's
+refusal of the yoke, and her iron-hardness to the dearest of men
+proposing it; and moreover, her further to be apprehended holding to the
+refusal, for the sake of consistency, if it was once uttered.  For her
+own sake, she shrank from hearing intentions, that distressing the good
+man, she would have to discountenance.  His candour in confessing
+disappointment, and his open face, his excellent sense too, gave her some
+assurance of his not being foolishly impetuous.  After he had read to her
+for an hour, as his habit was on evenings and wet days, their discussion
+of this and that in the book lulled any doubts she had of his prudence,
+enough to render it even a dubious point whether she might be speculating
+upon a wealthy bachelor in the old-fashioned ultra-feminine manner; the
+which she so abhorred that she rejected the idea.  Consequently,
+Redworth's proposal to walk down to the valley for Diana, and bring her
+back, struck her as natural when a shaft of western sunshine from a
+whitened edge of raincloud struck her windows.  She let him go without an
+intimated monition or a thought of one; thinking simply that her Tony
+would be more likely to come, having him for escort.  Those are silly
+women who are always imagining designs and intrigues and future
+palpitations in the commonest actions of either sex.  Emma Dunstane
+leaned to the contrast between herself and them.
+
+Danvers was at the house about sunset, reporting her mistress to be
+on her way, with Mr. Redworth.  The maid's tale of the dreadful state of
+the lanes, accounted for their tardiness; and besides the sunset had been
+magnificent.  Diana knocked at Emma's bedroom door, to say, outside,
+hurriedly in passing, how splendid the sunset had been, and beg for an
+extra five minutes.  Taking full fifteen, she swam into the drawing-room,
+lively with kisses on Emma's cheeks, and excuses, referring her
+misconduct in being late to the seductions of 'Sol' in his glory.
+Redworth said he had rarely seen so wonderful a sunset.  The result of
+their unanimity stirred Emma's bosom to match-making regrets; and the
+walk of the pair together, alone under the propitious laming heavens,
+appeared to her now as an opportunity lost.  From sisterly sympathy, she
+fancied she could understand Tony's liberty-loving reluctance: she had no
+comprehension of the backwardness of the man beholding the dear woman
+handsomer than in her maiden or her married time: and sprightlier as
+well.  She chatted deliciously, and drew Redworth to talk his best on his
+choicer subjects, playing over them like a fide-wisp, determined at once
+to flounder him and to make him shine.  Her tender esteem for the man was
+transparent through it all; and Emma, whose evening had gone happily
+between them, said to her, in their privacy, before parting: 'You seemed
+to have been inspired by "Sol," my dear.  You do like him, don't you?'
+
+Diana vowed she adored him; and with a face of laughter in rosy
+suffusion, put Sol for Redworth, Redworth for Sol; but, watchful of
+Emma's visage, said finally: 'If you mean the mortal man, I think him up
+to almost all your hyperboles--as far as men go; and he departed to his
+night's rest, which I hope will be good, like a king.  Not to admire him,
+would argue me senseless, heartless.  I do; I have reason to.'
+
+'And you make him the butt of your ridicule, Tony.'
+
+'No; I said "like a king"; and he is one.  He has, to me, morally the
+grandeur of your Sol sinking, Caesar stabbed, Cato on the sword-point.
+He is Roman, Spartan, Imperial; English, if you like, the pick, of the
+land.  It is an honour to call him friend, and I do trust he will choose
+the pick among us, to make her a happy woman--if she's for running in
+harness.  There, I can't say more.'
+
+Emma had to be satisfied with it, for the present.
+
+They were astonished at breakfast by seeing Sir Lukin ride past the
+windows.  He entered with the veritable appetite of a cavalier who had
+ridden from London fasting; and why he had come at that early hour, he
+was too hungry to explain.  The ladies retired to read their letters by
+the morning's post; whereupon Sir Lukin called to Redworth; 'I met that
+woman in the park yesterday, and had to stand a volley.  I went beating
+about London for you all the afternoon and evening.  She swears you rated
+her like a scullery wench, and threatened to ruin Wroxeter.  Did you see
+him?  She says, the story's true in one particular, that he did snatch a
+kiss, and got mauled.  Not so much to pay for it!  But what a ruffian--
+eh?'
+
+'I saw him,' said Redworth.  'He 's one of the new set of noblemen who
+take bribes to serve as baits for transactions in the City.  They help to
+the ruin of their order, or are signs of its decay.  We won't judge it by
+him.  He favoured me with his "word of honour" that the thing you heard
+was entirely a misstatement, and so forth:--apologized, I suppose.  He
+mumbled something.'
+
+'A thorough cur!'
+
+'He professed his readiness to fight, if either of us was not contented.'
+
+'He spoke to the wrong man.  I've half a mind to ride back and have him
+out for that rascal "osculation" and the lady unwilling!--and she a young
+one, a girl, under the protection of the house!  By Jove!  Redworth, when
+you come to consider the scoundrels men can be, it stirs a fellow's bile.
+There's a deal of that sort of villany going--and succeeding sometimes!
+He deserves the whip or a bullet.'
+
+'A sermon from Lukin Dunstane might punish him.'
+
+'Oh!  I'm a sinner, I know.  But, go and tell one woman of another woman,
+and that a lie!  That's beyond me.'
+
+'The gradations of the deeps are perhaps measurable to those who are in
+them.'
+
+'The sermon's at me--pop!' said Sir Lukin.  'By the way, I'm coming round
+to think Diana Warwick was right when she used to jibe at me for throwing
+up my commission.  Idleness is the devil--or mother of him.  I manage my
+estates; but the truth is, it doesn't occupy my mind.'
+
+'Your time.'
+
+'My mind, I say.'
+
+'Whichever you please.'
+
+'You're crusty to-day, Redworth.  Let me tell you, I think--and hard too,
+when the fit's on me.  However, you did right in stopping--I'll own--a
+piece of folly, and shutting the mouths of those two; though it caused me
+to come in for a regular drencher.  But a pretty woman in a right-down
+termagant passion is good theatre; because it can't last, at that pace;
+and you're sure of your agreeable tableau.  Not that I trust her ten
+minutes out of sight--or any woman, except one or two; my wife and Diana
+Warwick.  Trust those you've tried, old boy.  Diana Warwick ought to be
+taught to thank you; though I don't know how it's to be done.'
+
+'The fact of it is,' Redworth frowned and rose, 'I've done mischief.
+I had no right to mix myself in it.  I'm seldom caught off my feet by
+an impulse; but I was.  I took the fever from you.'
+
+He squared his figure at the window, and looked up on a driving sky.
+
+'Come, let's play open cards, Tom Redworth,' said Sir Lukin, leaving the
+table and joining his friend by the window.  'You moral men are doomed to
+be marrying men, always; and quite right.  Not that one doesn't hear a
+roundabout thing or two about you: no harm.  Very much the contrary:--
+as the world goes.  But you're the man to marry a wife; and if I guess
+the lady, she's a sensible girl and won't be jealous.  I 'd swear she
+only waits for asking.'
+
+'Then you don't guess the lady,' said Redworth.
+
+'Mary Paynham?'
+
+The desperate half-laugh greeting the name convinced more than a dozen
+denials.
+
+Sir Lukin kept edging round for a full view of the friend who shunned
+inspection.  'But is it?  .  .  .  can it be?  it must be, after all!
+.  .  .  why, of course it is!  But the thing staring us in the face is
+just what we never see.  Just the husband for her!--and she's the wife!
+Why, Diana Warwick 's the very woman, of course!  I remember I used to
+think so before she was free to wed.'
+
+'She is not of that opinion.'  Redworth blew a heavy breath; and it
+should be chronicled as a sigh; but it was hugely masculine.
+
+'Because you didn't attack, the moment she was free; that 's what upset
+my calculations,' the sagacious gentleman continued, for a vindication of
+his acuteness: then seizing the reply: 'Refuses? you don't mean to say
+you're the man to take a refusal?  and from a green widow in the blush?
+Did you see her cheeks when she was peeping at the letter in her hand?
+She colours at half a word--takes the lift of a finger for Hymen coming.
+And lots of fellows are after her; I know it from Emmy.  But you're not
+the man to be refused.  You're her friend--her champion.  That woman
+Fryar-Gunnett would have it you were the favoured lover, and sneered at
+my talk of old friendship.  Women are always down dead on the facts;
+can't put them off a scent!'
+
+'There's the mischief!'  Redworth blew again.  'I had no right to be
+championing Mrs. Warwick's name.  Or the world won't give it, at all
+events.  I'm a blundering donkey.  Yes, she wishes to keep her liberty.
+And, upon my soul, I'm in love with everything she wishes! I've got the
+habit.'
+
+'Habit be hanged!' cried Sir Lukin.  'You're in love with the woman.
+I know a little more of you now, Mr. Tom.  You're a fellow in earnest
+about what you do.  You're feeling it now, on the rack, by heaven!
+though you keep a bold face.  Did she speak positively?--sort of feminine
+of "you're the monster, not the man"?  or measured little doctor's dose
+of pity?--worse sign.'  You 're not going?'
+
+'If you'll drive me down in half an hour,' said Redworth.
+
+'Give me an hour,' Sir Lukin replied, and went straight to his wife's
+blue-room.
+
+Diana was roused from a meditation on a letter she held, by the entrance
+of Emma in her bed-chamber, to whom she said: 'I have here the very
+craziest bit of writing!--but what is disturbing you, dear?'
+
+Emma sat beside her, panting and composing her lips to speak.  'Do you,
+love me?  I throw policy to the winds, if only, I can batter at you for
+your heart and find it!  Tony, do you love me?  But don't answer: give me
+your hand.  You have rejected him!'
+
+'He has told you?'
+
+'No.  He is not the man to cry out for a wound.  He heard in London--
+Lukin has had the courage to tell me, after his fashion:--Tom Redworth
+heard an old story, coming from one of the baser kind of women: grossly
+false, he knew.  I mention only Lord Wroxeter and Lockton.  He went to
+man and woman both, and had it refuted, and stopped their tongues, on
+peril; as he of all men is able to do when he wills it.'
+
+Observing the quick change in Tony's eyes, Emma exclaimed: 'How you
+looked disdain when you asked whether he had told me!  But why are you
+the handsome tigress to him, of all men living!  The dear fellow, dear
+to me at least! since the day he first saw you, has worshipped you and
+striven to serve you:--and harder than any Scriptural service to have the
+beloved woman to wife.  I know nothing to compare with it, for he is a
+man of warmth.  He is one of those rare men of honour who can command
+their passion; who venerate when they love: and those are the men that
+women select for punishment!  Yes, you!  It is to the woman he loves that
+he cannot show himself as he is, because he is at her feet.  You have
+managed to stamp your spirit on him; and as a consequence, he defends
+you now, for flinging him off.  And now his chief regret is, that he has
+caused his name to be coupled with yours.  I suppose he had some poor
+hope, seeing you free.  Or else the impulse to protect the woman of his
+heart and soul was too strong.  I have seen what he suffered, years back,
+at the news of your engagement.'
+
+'Oh, for God's sake, don't,' cried Tony, tears running over, and her
+dream of freedom, her visions of romance, drowning.
+
+'It was like the snapping of the branch of an oak, when the trunk stands
+firm,' Emma resumed, in her desire to scourge as well as to soften.  'But
+similes applied to him will strike you as incongruous.'  Tony swayed her
+body, for a negative, very girlishly and consciously.  'He probably did
+not woo you in a poetic style, or the courtly by prescription.'  Again
+Tony swayed; she had to hug herself under the stripes, and felt as if
+alone at sea, with her dear heavens pelting.  'You have sneered at him
+for his calculating--to his face: and it was when he was comparatively
+poor that he calculated--to his cost! that he dared not ask you to marry
+a man who could not offer you a tithe of what he considered fit for the
+peerless woman.  Peerless, I admit.  There he was not wrong.  But if he
+had valued you half a grain less, he might have won you.  You talk much
+of chivalry; you conceive a superhuman ideal, to which you fit a very
+indifferent wooden model, while the man of all the world the most
+chivalrous!  .  .  .  He is a man quite other from what you think him:
+anything but a "Cuthbert Dering" or a "Man of Two Minds."  He was in the
+drawing-room below, on the day I received your last maiden letter from
+The Crossways--now his property, in the hope of making it yours.'
+
+'I behaved abominably there!' interposed Tony, with a gasp.
+
+'Let it pass.  At any rate, that was the prick of a needle, not the blow
+of a sword.'
+
+'But marriage, dear Emmy!  marriage!  Is marriage to be the end of me?'
+
+'What amazing apotheosis have you in prospect?  And are you steering so
+particularly well by yourself?'
+
+'Miserably!  But I can dream.  And the thought of a husband cuts me from
+any dreaming.  It's all dead flat earth at once!'
+
+'Would, you lave rejected him when you were a girl?'
+
+'I think so.'
+
+'The superior merits of another .  .  .?'
+
+'Oh, no, no, no, no!  I might have accepted him: and I might not have
+made him happy.  I wanted a hero, and the jewelled garb and the feather
+did not suit him.'
+
+'No; he is not that description of lay-figure.  You have dressed it, and
+gemmed it, and--made your discovery.  Here is a true man; and if you can
+find me any of your heroes to match him, I will thank you.  He came on
+the day I speak of, to consult me as to whether, with the income he then
+had .  .  .  Well, I had to tell him you were engaged.  The man has never
+wavered in his love of you since that day.  He has had to bear
+something.'
+
+This was an electrical bolt into Tony's bosom, shaking her from self-pity
+and shame to remorseful pity of the suffering lover; and the tears ran in
+streams, as she said:
+
+'He bore it, Emmy, he bore it.'  She sobbed out: 'And he went on building
+a fortune and batting!  Whatever he undertakes he does perfectly-approve
+of the pattern or not.  Oh!  I have no doubt he had his nest of wish
+piping to him all the while: only it seems quaint, dear, quaint, and
+against everything we've been reading of lovers!  Love was his bread and
+butter!'  Her dark eyes showered.  'And to tell you what you do not know
+of him, his way of making love is really,' she sobbed, 'pretty.  It . . .
+it took me by surprise; I was expecting a bellow and an assault of horns;
+and if, dear:--you will say, what boarding-school girl have you got with
+you!  and I feel myself getting childish:--if Sol in his glory had not
+been so m .  .  .  majestically m .  .  .  magnificent, nor seemed to
+show me the king .  .  .  kingdom of my dreams, I might have stammered
+the opposite word to the one he heard.  Last night, when he took my hand
+kindly before going to bed I had a fit for dropping on my knees to him.
+I saw him bleed, and he held himself right royally.  I told you he did;
+--Sol in his moral grandeur!  How infinitely above the physical monarch--
+is he not, Emmy?  What one dislikes, is the devotion of all that grandeur
+to win a widow.  It should be a maiden princess.  You feel it so, I am
+sure.  And here am I, as if a maiden princess were I, demanding romantic
+accessories of rubious vapour in the man condescending to implore the
+widow to wed him.  But, tell me, does he know everything of his widow--
+everything?  I shall not have to go through the frightful chapter?'
+
+'He is a man with his eyes awake; he knows as much as any husband could
+require to know,' said Emma; adding: 'My darling!  he trusts you.  It is
+the soul of the man that loves you, as it is mine.  You will not tease
+him?  Promise me.  Give yourself frankly.  You see it clearly before
+you.'
+
+'I see compulsion, my dear.  What I see, is a regiment of Proverbs,
+bearing placards instead of guns, and each one a taunt at women,
+especially at widows.  They march; they form square; they enclose me in
+the middle, and I have their inscriptions to digest.  Read that crazy
+letter from Mary Paynham while I am putting on my bonnet.  I perceive I
+have been crying like a raw creature in her teens.  I don't know myself.
+An advantage of the darker complexions is our speedier concealment of the
+traces.'
+
+Emma read Miss Paynham's letter, and returned it with the comment:
+'Utterly crazy.'  Tony said: 'Is it not?  I am to "Pause before I trifle
+with a noble heart too long."  She is to "have her happiness in the
+constant prayer for ours";  and she is "warned by one of those
+intimations never failing her, that he runs a serious danger."  It reads
+like a Wizard's Almanack.  And here "Homogeneity of sentiment the most
+perfect, is unable to contend with the fatal charm, which exercised by an
+indifferent person, must be ascribed to original predestination."  She
+should be under the wing of Lady Wathin. There is the mother for such
+chicks!  But I'll own to you, Emmy, that after the perusal, I did ask
+myself a question as to my likeness of late to the writer.  I have
+drivelled .  .  .  I was shuddering over it when you came in.  I have
+sentimentalized up to thin smoke.  And she tells a truth when she says I
+am not to "count social cleverness"--she means volubility--" as a warrant
+for domineering a capacious intelligence": because of the gentleman's
+modesty.  Agreed: I have done it; I am contrite.  I am going into slavery
+to make amends for presumption.  Banality, thy name is marriage!'
+
+'Your business is to accept life as we have it,' said Emma; and Tony
+shrugged.  She was precipitate in going forth to her commonplace fate,
+and scarcely looked at the man requested by Emma to escort her to her
+cottage.  After their departure, Emma fell into laughter at the last
+words with the kiss of her cheeks: 'Here goes old Ireland!' But, from her
+look and from what she had said upstairs, Emma could believe that the
+singular sprite of girlishness invading and governing her latterly, had
+yielded place to the woman she loved.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLIII
+
+NUPTIAL CHAPTER; AND OF HOW A BARELY WILLING WOMAN WAS LED TO BLOOM WITH
+THE NUPTIAL SENTIMENT
+
+Emma watched them on their way through the park, till they rounded the
+beechwood, talking, it could be surmised, of ordinary matters; the face
+of the gentleman turning at times to his companion's, which steadily
+fronted the gale.  She left the ensuing to a prayer for their good
+direction, with a chuckle at Tony's evident feeling of a ludicrous
+posture, and the desperate rush of her agile limbs to have it over.
+But her prayer throbbed almost to a supplication that the wrong done
+to her beloved by Dacier--the wound to her own sisterly pride rankling as
+an injury to her sex, might be cancelled through the union of the woman
+noble in the sight of God with a more manlike man.
+
+Meanwhile the feet of the couple were going faster than their heads to
+the end of the journey.  Diana knew she would have to hoist the signal-
+and how?  The prospect was dumb-foundering.  She had to think of
+appeasing her Emma.  Redworth, for his part; actually supposed she had
+accepted his escorting in proof of the plain friendship offered him
+overnight.
+
+'What do your "birds" do in weather like this?' she said.
+
+'Cling to their perches and wait patiently.  It's the bad time with them
+when you don't hear them chirp.'
+
+'Of course you foretold the gale.'
+
+'Oh, well, it did not require a shepherd or a skipper for that.'
+
+'Your grand gift will be useful to a yachtsman.'
+
+'You like yachting.  When I have tried my new schooner in the Channel,
+she is at your command for as long as you and Lady Dunstane please.'
+
+'So you acknowledge that birds--things of nature--have their bad time?'
+
+'They profit ultimately by the deluge and the wreck.  Nothing on earth is
+"tucked-up" in perpetuity.'
+
+'Except the dead.  But why should the schooner be at our command?'
+
+'I shall be in Ireland.'
+
+He could not have said sweeter to her ears or more touching.
+
+'We shall hardly feel safe without the weatherwise on board.'
+
+'You may count on my man Barnes; I have proved him.  He is up to his work
+even when he's bilious: only, in that case, occurring about once a
+fortnight, you must leave him to fight it out with the elements.'
+
+'I rather like men of action to have a temper.'
+
+'I can't say much for a bilious temper.'
+
+The weather to-day really seemed of that kind, she remarked.  He
+assented, in the shrug manner--not to dissent: she might say what she
+would.  He helped nowhere to a lead; and so quick are the changes of mood
+at such moments that she was now far from him under the failure of an
+effort to come near.  But thoughts of Emma pressed.
+
+'The name of the new schooner?  Her name is her picture to me.'
+
+'I wanted you to christen her.'
+
+'Launched without a name?'
+
+'I took a liberty.'
+
+Needless to ask, but she did.  'With whom?'
+
+'I named her Diana.'
+
+'May the Goddess of the silver bow and crescent protect her!  To me the
+name is ominous of mischance.'
+
+'I would commit my fortunes and life .  .  .  !'  He checked his tongue,
+ejaculating: 'Omens!'
+
+She had veered straight away from her romantic aspirations to the blunt
+extreme of thinking that a widow should be wooed in unornamented matter-
+of-fact, as she is wedded, with a 'wilt thou,' and 'I will,' and no
+decorative illusions.  Downright, for the unpoetic creature, if you
+please!  So she rejected the accompaniment of the silver Goddess and high
+seas for an introduction of the crisis.
+
+'This would be a thunderer on our coasts.  I had a trial of my sailing
+powers in the Mediterranean.'
+
+As she said it, her musings on him then, with the contract of her
+position toward him now, fierily brushed her cheeks; and she wished him
+the man to make one snatch at her poor lost small butterfly bit of
+freedom, so that she might suddenly feel in haven, at peace with her
+expectant Emma.  He could have seen the inviting consciousness, but he
+was absurdly watchful lest the flying sprays of border trees should
+strike her.  He mentioned his fear, and it became an excuse for her
+seeking protection of her veil.  'It is our natural guardian,' she said.
+
+'Not much against timber,' said he.
+
+The worthy creature's anxiety was of the pattern of cavaliers escorting
+dames--an exaggeration of honest zeal; a present example of clownish
+goodness, it might seem; until entering the larch and firwood along the
+beaten heights, there was a rocking and straining of the shallow-rooted
+trees in a tremendous gust that quite pardoned him for curving his arm in
+a hoop about her and holding a shoulder in front.  The veil did her
+positive service.
+
+He was honourably scrupulous not to presume.  A right good unimpulsive
+gentleman: the same that she had always taken him for and liked.
+
+'These firs are not taproots,' he observed, by way of apology.
+
+Her dress volumed and her ribands rattled and chirruped on the verge of
+the slope.  'I will take your arm here,' she said.
+
+Redworth received the little hand, saying: 'Lean to me.'
+
+They descended upon great surges of wind piping and driving every light
+surface-atom as foam; and they blinked and shook; even the man was
+shaken.  But their arms were interlinked and they grappled; the battering
+enemy made them one.  It might mean nothing, or everything: to him it
+meant the sheer blissful instant.
+
+At the foot of the hill, he said: 'It's harder to keep to, the terms of
+yesterday.'
+
+'What were they?' said she, and took his breath more than the fury of the
+storm had done.
+
+'Raise the veil, I beg.'
+
+'Widows do not wear it.'
+
+The look revealed to him was a fugitive of the wilds, no longer the
+glittering shooter of arrows.
+
+'Have you . . .?'  changed to me, was the signification understood.
+'Can you?--for life'.  Do you think you can?'
+
+His poverty in the pleading language melted her.
+
+'What I cannot do, my best of friends, is to submit to be seated on a
+throne, with you petitioning.  Yes, as far as concerns this hand of mine,
+if you hold it worthy of you.  We will speak of that.  Now tell me the
+name of the weed trailing along the hedge there!
+
+He knew it well; a common hedgerow weed; but the placid diversion baffled
+him.  It was clematis, he said.
+
+'It drags in the dust when it has no firm arm to cling to.  I passed it
+beside you yesterday with a flaunting mind and not a suspicion of a
+likeness.  How foolish I was!  I could volubly sermonize; only it should
+be a young maid to listen.  Forgive me the yesterday.'
+
+'You have never to ask.  You withdraw your hand--was I rough?'
+
+'No,' she smiled demurely; 'it must get used to the shackles: but my
+cottage is in sight.  I have a growing love for the place.  We will enter
+it like plain people--if you think of coming in.'
+
+As she said it she had a slight shock of cowering under eyes tolerably
+hawkish in their male glitter; but her coolness was not disturbed; and
+without any apprehensions she reflected on what has been written of the
+silly division and war of the sexes:--which two might surely enter on an
+engagement to live together amiably, unvexed by that barbarous old fowl
+and falcon interlude.  Cool herself, she imagined the same of him, having
+good grounds for the delusion; so they passed through the cottage-garden
+and beneath the low porchway, into her little sitting-room, where she was
+proceeding to speak composedly of her preference for cottages, while
+untying her bonnet-strings:--'If I had begun my life in a cottage!'--when
+really a big storm-wave caught her from shore and whirled her to mid-sea,
+out of every sensibility but the swimming one of her loss of self in the
+man.
+
+'You would not have been here!' was all he said.  She was up at his
+heart, fast-locked, undergoing a change greater than the sea works; her
+thoughts one blush, her brain a fire-fount.  This was not like being
+seated on a throne.
+
+'There,' said he, loosening his hug, 'now you belong to me!  I know you
+from head to foot.  After that, my darling, I could leave you for years,
+and call you wife, and be sure of you.  I could swear it for you--my life
+on it!  That 's what I think of you.  Don't wonder that I took my chance
+--the first:--I have waited!'
+
+Truer word was never uttered, she owned, coming into some harmony with
+man's kiss on her mouth: the man violently metamorphozed to a stranger,
+acting on rights she had given him.  And who was she to dream of denying
+them?  Not an idea in her head!  Bound verily to be thankful for such
+love, on hearing that it dated from the night in Ireland .  .  .  .
+'So in love with you that, on my soul, your happiness was my marrow--
+whatever you wished; anything you chose.  It's reckoned a fool's part.
+No, it's love: the love of a woman--the one woman!  I was like the hand
+of a clock to the springs.  I taught this old watch-dog of a heart to
+keep guard and bury the bones you tossed him.'
+
+'Ignorantly, admit,' said she, and could have bitten her tongue for the
+empty words that provoked: 'Would you have flung him nothing?' and caused
+a lowering of her eyelids and shamed glimpses of recollections.  'I hear
+you have again been defending me.  I told you, I think, I wished I had
+begun my girl's life in a cottage.  All that I have had to endure!  .  .
+or so it seems to me: it may be my way of excusing myself:--I know my
+cunning in that peculiar art.  I would take my chance of mixing among the
+highest and the brightest.'
+
+'Naturally.'
+
+'Culpably.'
+
+'It brings you to me.'
+
+'Through a muddy channel.'
+
+'Your husband has full faith in you, my own.'
+
+'The faith has to be summoned and is buffeted, as we were just now on the
+hill.  I wish he had taken me from a cottage.'
+
+'You pushed for the best society, like a fish to its native sea.'
+
+'Pray say, a salmon to the riverheads.'
+
+'Better,' Redworth laughed joyfully, between admiration of the tongue
+that always outflew him, and of the face he reddened.
+
+By degrees her apter and neater terms of speech helped her to a notion of
+regaining some steps of her sunken ascendancy, under the weight of the
+novel masculine pressure on her throbbing blood; and when he bent to her
+to take her lord's farewell of her, after agreeing to go and delight Emma
+with a message, her submission and her personal pride were not so much at
+variance: perhaps because her buzzing head had no ideas.  'Tell Emma you
+have undertaken to wash the blackamoor as white as she can be,' she said
+perversely, in her spite at herself for not coming, as it were, out of
+the dawn to the man she could consent to wed: and he replied: 'I shall
+tell her my dark girl pleads for a fortnight's grace before she and I set
+sail for the West coast of Ireland': conjuring a picture that checked any
+protest against the shortness of time:--and Emma would surely be his
+ally.
+
+They talked of the Dublin Ball: painfully to some of her thoughts.
+But Redworth kissed that distant brilliant night as freshly as if no
+belabouring years rolled in the chasm: which led her to conceive partly,
+and wonderingly, the nature of a strong man's passion; and it subjugated
+the woman knowing of a contrast.  The smart of the blow dealt her by him
+who had fired the passion in her became a burning regret for the loss of
+that fair fame she had sacrificed to him, and could not bring to her
+truer lover: though it was but the outer view of herself--the world's
+view; only she was generous and of honest conscience, and but for the
+sake of her truer lover, she would mentally have allowed the world to
+lash and abuse her, without a plea of material purity.  Could it be
+named?  The naming of it in her clear mind lessened it to accidental:--
+By good fortune, she was no worse!--She said to Redworth, when finally
+dismissing him; 'I bring no real disgrace to you, my friend.'--To have
+had this sharp spiritual battle at such a time, was proof of honest
+conscience, rarer among women, as the world has fashioned them yet, than
+the purity demanded of them.--His answer: 'You are my wife!' rang in her
+hearing.
+
+When she sat alone at last, she was incapable, despite her nature's
+imaginative leap to brightness, of choosing any single period, auspicious
+or luminous or flattering, since the hour of her first meeting this man,
+rather than the grey light he cast on her, promising helpfulness, and
+inspiring a belief in her capacity to help.  Not the Salvatore high
+raptures nor the nights of social applause could appear preferable: she
+strained her shattered wits to try them.  As for her superlunary sphere,
+it was in fragments; and she mused on the singularity, considering that
+she was not deeply enamoured.  Was she so at all?  The question drove her
+to embrace the dignity of being reasonable--under Emmy's guidance.  For
+she did not stand firmly alone; her story confessed it.  Marriage might
+be the archway to the road of good service, even as our passage through
+the flesh may lead to the better state.  She had thoughts of the kind,
+and had them while encouraging herself to deplore the adieu to her little
+musk-scented sitting-room, where a modest freedom breathed, and her
+individuality had seemed pointing to a straighter growth.
+
+She nodded subsequently to the truth of her happy Emma's remark: 'You
+were created for the world, Tony.'  A woman of blood and imagination in
+the warring world, without a mate whom she can revere, subscribes to a
+likeness with those independent minor realms between greedy mighty
+neighbours, which conspire and undermine when they do not openly threaten
+to devour.  So, then, this union, the return to the wedding yoke,
+received sanction of grey-toned reason.  She was not enamoured she could
+say it to herself.  She had, however, been surprised, both by the man and
+her unprotesting submission; surprised and warmed, unaccountably warmed.
+Clearness of mind in the woman chaste by nature, however little ignorant
+it allowed her to be in the general review of herself, could not compass
+the immediately personal, with its acknowledgement of her subserviency to
+touch and pressure--and more, stranger, her readiness to kindle.  She
+left it unexplained.  Unconsciously the image of Dacier was effaced.
+Looking backward, her heart was moved to her long-constant lover with
+most pitying tender wonderment--stormy man, as her threatened senses told
+her that he was.  Looking at him, she had to mask her being abashed and
+mastered.  And looking forward, her soul fell in prayer for this true
+man's never repenting of his choice.  Sure of her now, Mr. Thomas
+Redworth had returned to the station of the courtier, and her feminine
+sovereignty was not ruffled to make her feel too feminine.  Another
+revelation was his playful talk when they were more closely intimate.
+He had his humour as well as his hearty relish of hers.
+
+'If all Englishmen were like him!' she chimed with Emma Dunstane's
+eulogies, under the influence.
+
+'My dear,' the latter replied, 'we should simply march over the Four
+Quarters and be blessed by the nations!  Only, avoid your trick of
+dashing headlong to the other extreme.  He has his faults.'
+
+'Tell me of them,' Diana cooed for an answer.  'Do.  I want the flavour.
+A girl would be satisfied with superhuman excellence.  A widow asks for
+feature.'
+
+'To my thinking, the case is, that if it is a widow who sees the
+superhuman excellence in a man, she may be very well contented to cross
+the bridge with him,' rejoined Emma.  .  .  .
+
+'Suppose the bridge to break, and for her to fall into the water, he
+rescuing her--then perhaps!'
+
+'But it has been happening!'
+
+'But piecemeal, in extension, so slowly.  I go to him a derelict, bearing
+a story of the sea; empty of ideas.  I remember sailing out of harbour
+passably well freighted for commerce.'
+
+'When Tom Redworth has had command of the "derelict" a week, I should
+like to see her!'
+
+The mention of that positive captaincy drowned Diana in morning colours.
+She was dominated, physically and morally, submissively too.  What she
+craved, in the absence of the public whiteness which could have caused
+her to rejoice in herself as a noble gift, was the spring of enthusiasm.
+Emma touched a quivering chord of pride with her hint at the good augury,
+and foreshadowing of the larger Union, in the Irishwoman's bestowal of
+her hand on the open-minded Englishman she had learned to trust.  The
+aureole glimmered transiently: she could neither think highly of the
+woman about to be wedded, nor poetically of the man; nor, therefore,
+rosily of the ceremony, nor other than vacuously of life.  And yet, as
+she avowed to Emma, she had gathered the three rarest good things of
+life: a faithful friend, a faithful lover, a faithful servant: the two
+latter exposing an unimagined quality of emotion.  Danvers, on the night
+of the great day for Redworth, had undressed her with trembling fingers,
+and her mistress was led to the knowledge that the maid had always been
+all eye; and on reflection to admit that it came of a sympathy she did
+not share.
+
+But when Celtic brains are reflective on their emotional vessel they
+shoot direct as the arrow of logic.  Diana's glance at the years behind
+lighted every moving figure to a shrewd transparency, herself among them.
+She was driven to the conclusion that the granting of any of her heart's
+wild wishes in those days would have lowered her--or frozen.  Dacier was
+a coldly luminous image; still a tolling name; no longer conceivably her
+mate.  Recollection rocked, not she.  The politician and citizen was
+admired: she read the man;--more to her own discredit than to his, but
+she read him, and if that is done by the one of two lovers who was true
+to love, it is the God of the passion pronouncing a final release from
+the shadow of his chains.
+
+Three days antecedent to her marriage, she went down the hill over her
+cottage chimneys with Redworth, after hearing him praise and cite to Emma
+Dunstane sentences of a morning's report of a speech delivered by Dacier
+to his constituents.  She alluded to it, that she might air her power of
+speaking of the man coolly to him, or else for the sake of stirring
+afresh some sentiment he had roused; and he repeated his high opinion of
+the orator's political wisdom: whereby was revived in her memory a
+certain reprehensible view, belonging to her period of mock-girlish
+naughtiness--too vile!--as to his paternal benevolence, now to clear
+vision the loftiest manliness.  What did she do?  She was Irish;
+therefore intuitively decorous in amatory challenges and interchanges.
+But she was an impulsive woman, and foliage was thick around, only a few
+small birds and heaven seeing; and penitence and admiration sprang the
+impulse.  It had to be this or a burst of weeping:--she put a kiss upon
+his arm.
+
+She had omitted to think that she was dealing with a lover a man of
+smothered fire, who would be electrically alive to the act through a
+coat-sleeve.  Redworth had his impulse.  He kept it under,--she felt the
+big breath he drew in.  Imagination began busily building a nest for him,
+and enthusiasm was not sluggish to make a home of it.  The impulse of
+each had wedded; in expression and repression; her sensibility told her
+of the stronger.
+
+She rose on the morning of her marriage day with his favourite Planxty
+Kelly at her lips, a natural bubble of the notes.  Emma drove down to the
+cottage to breakfast and superintend her bride's adornment, as to which,
+Diana had spoken slightingly; as well as of the ceremony, and the
+institution, and this life itself:--she would be married out of her
+cottage, a widow, a cottager, a woman under a cloud; yes, a sober person
+taking at last a right practical step, to please her two best friends.
+The change was marked.  She wished to hide it, wished to confide it.
+Emma was asked: 'How is he this morning?' and at the answer, describing
+his fresh and spirited looks, and his kind ways with Arthur Rhodes, and
+his fun with Sullivan Smith, and the satisfaction with the bridegroom
+declared by Lord Larrian (invalided from his Rock and unexpectingly
+informed of the wedding), Diana forgot that she had kissed her, and this
+time pressed her lips, in a manner to convey the secret bridally.
+
+'He has a lovely day.'
+
+'And bride,' said Emma.
+
+'If you two think so!  I should like to agree with my dear old lord and
+bless him for the prize he takes, though it feels itself at present
+rather like a Christmas bon-bon--a piece of sugar in the wrap of a rhymed
+motto.  He is kind to Arthur, you say?'
+
+'Like a cordial elder brother.'
+
+'Dear love, I have it at heart that I was harsh upon Mary Paynham for her
+letter.  She meant well--and I fear she suffers.  And it may have been a
+bit my fault.  Blind that I was!  When you say "cordial elder brother,"
+you make him appear beautiful to me.  The worst of that is, one becomes
+aware of the inability to match him.'
+
+'Read with his eyes when you meet him this morning, my Tony.'
+
+The secret was being clearly perceived by Emma, whose pride in assisting
+to dress the beautiful creature for her marriage--with the man of men had
+a tinge from the hymenaeal brand, exulting over Dacier, and in the
+compensation coming to her beloved for her first luckless footing on this
+road.
+
+'How does he go down to the church?' said Diana.
+
+'He walks down.  Lukin and his Chief drive.  He walks, with your Arthur
+and Mr. Sullivan Smith.  He is on his way now.'
+
+Diana looked through the window in the direction of the hill.  'That is
+so like him, to walk to his wedding!'
+
+Emma took the place of Danvers in the office of the robing, for the maid,
+as her mistress managed to hint, was too steeped 'in the colour of the
+occasion' to be exactly tasteful, and had the art, no doubt through
+sympathy, of charging permissible common words with explosive meanings:--
+she was in an amorous palpitation, of the reflected state.  After several
+knockings and enterings of the bedchamber-door, she came hurriedly to
+say: 'And your pillow, ma'am?  I had almost forgotten it!'  A question
+that caused her mistress to drop the gaze of a moan on Emma, with
+patience trembling.  Diana preferred a hard pillow, and usually carried
+her own about.  'Take it,' she had to reply.
+
+The friends embraced before descending to step into the fateful carriage.
+'And tell me,' Emma said, 'are not your views of life brighter to-day?'
+
+'Too dazzled to know!  It may be a lamp close to the eyes or a radiance
+of sun.  I hope they are.'
+
+'You are beginning to think hopefully again?'
+
+'Who can really think, and not think hopefully?  You were in my mind last
+night, and you brought a little boat to sail me past despondency of life
+and the fear of extinction.  When we despair or discolour things, it is
+our senses in revolt, and they have made the sovereign brain their
+drudge.  I heard you whisper; with your very breath in my ear: "There is
+nothing the body suffers that the soul may not profit by."  That is
+Emma's history.  With that I sail into the dark; it is my promise of the
+immortal: teaches me to see immortality for us.  It comes from you, my
+Emmy.'
+
+If not a great saying, it was in the heart of deep thoughts: proof to
+Emma that her Tony's mind had resumed its old clear high-aiming activity;
+therefore that her nature was working sanely, and that she accepted her
+happiness, and bore love for a dower to her husband.  No blushing
+confession of the woman's love of the man would have told her so much as
+the return to mental harmony with the laws of life shown in her darling's
+pellucid little sentence.
+
+She revolved it long after the day of the wedding.  To Emma, constantly
+on the dark decline of the unillumined verge, between the two worlds,
+those words were a radiance and a nourishment.  Had they waned she would
+have trimmed them to feed her during her soul-sister's absence.  They
+shone to her of their vitality.  She was lying along her sofa, facing her
+South-western window, one afternoon of late November, expecting Tony from
+her lengthened honeymoon trip, while a sunset in the van of frost, not
+without celestial musical reminders of Tony's husband, began to deepen;
+and as her friend was coming, she mused on the scenes of her friend's
+departure, and how Tony, issuing from her cottage porch had betrayed her
+feelings in the language of her sex by stooping to lift above her head
+and kiss the smallest of her landlady's children ranged up the garden-
+path to bid her farewell over their strewing of flowers;--and of her
+murmur to Tony, entering the churchyard, among the grave-mounds: 'Old
+Ireland won't repent it!' and Tony's rejoinder, at the sight of the
+bridegroom advancing, beaming: 'A singular transformation of Old
+England!'--and how, having numberless ready sources of laughter and tears
+down the run of their heart-in-heart intimacy, all spouting up for a word
+in the happy tremour of the moment, they had both bitten their lips and
+blinked on a moisture of the eyelids.  Now the dear woman was really
+wedded, wedded and mated.  Her letters breathed, in their own lively or
+thoughtful flow, of the perfect mating.  Emma gazed into the depths of
+the waves of crimson, where brilliancy of colour came out of central
+heaven preternaturally near on earth, till one shade less brilliant
+seemed an ebbing away to boundless remoteness.  Angelical and mortal
+mixed, making the glory overhead a sign of the close union of our human
+conditions with the ethereal and psychically divined.  Thence it grew
+that one thought in her breast became a desire for such extension of days
+as would give her the blessedness to clasp in her lap--if those kind
+heavens would grant it!--a child of the marriage of the two noblest of
+human souls, one the dearest; and so have proof at heart that her country
+and our earth are fruitful in the good, for a glowing future.  She was
+deeply a woman, dumbly a poet.  True poets and true women have the native
+sense of the divineness of what the world deems gross material substance.
+Emma's exaltation in fervour had not subsided when she held her beloved
+in her arms under the dusk of the withdrawing redness.  They sat
+embraced, with hands locked, in the unlighted room, and Tony spoke of the
+splendid sky.  'You watched it knowing I was on my way to you?'
+
+'Praying, dear.'
+
+'For me?'
+
+'That I might live long enough to be a godmother.'
+
+There was no reply: there was an involuntary little twitch of Tony's
+fingers.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+Accidents are the specific for averting the maladies of age
+Accounting for it, is not the same as excusing
+Assist in our small sphere; not come mouthing to the footlights
+Avoid the position that enforces publishing
+Capacity for thinking should precede the act of writing
+Chaste are wattled in formalism and throned in sourness
+Could the best of men be simply--a woman's friend?
+Enthusiasm has the privilege of not knowing monotony
+Envy of the man of positive knowledge
+Expectations dupe us, not trust
+Externally soft and polished, internally hard and relentless
+Fiddle harmonics on the sensual strings
+Heart to keep guard and bury the bones you tossed him
+Holding to the refusal, for the sake of consistency
+I don't count them against women (moods)
+I never knew till this morning the force of No in earnest
+I wanted a hero
+I'm in love with everything she wishes! I've got the habit
+If he had valued you half a grain less, he might have won you
+Infatuated men argue likewise, and scandal does not move them
+It is the devil's masterstroke to get us to accuse him
+Let never Necessity draw the bow of our weakness
+Literature is a good stick and a bad horse
+Material good reverses its benefits the more nearly we clasp it
+Mistake of the world is to think happiness possible to the sense
+Nothing is a secret that has been spoken
+Nothing the body suffers that the soul may not profit by
+Now far from him under the failure of an effort to come near
+Our weakness is the swiftest dog to hunt us
+Question the gain of such an expenditure of energy
+Rare men of honour who can command their passion
+Read with his eyes when you meet him this morning
+Sham spiritualism
+She had sunk her intelligence in her sensations
+Sympathy is for proving, not prating
+The debts we owe ourselves are the hardest to pay
+Trial of her beauty of a woman in a temper
+We don't know we are in halves
+We're a peaceful people, but 'ware who touches us
+Weighty little word--woman's native watchdog and guardian (No!)
+When we despair or discolour things, it is our senses in revolt
+Who can really think, and not think hopefully?
+Who venerate when they love
+With that I sail into the dark
+Women with brains, moreover, are all heartless
+
+
+
+
+[The End]
+
+
+
+
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+End of the Project Gutenberg etext of Diana of the Crossways, v5,
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