Diana, a wife and no wife, a prisoner in liberty, a blooming woman imagining herself restored to transcendent maiden ecstacies—­the highest youthful poetic—­had received some faint intimation when the blush flamed suddenly in her cheeks and her heart knelled like the towers of a city given over to the devourer.  She had no wish to meet him again.  Without telling herself why, she would have shunned the meeting.  Disturbers that thwarted her simple happiness in sublime scenery were best avoided.  She thought so the more for a fitful blur to the simplicity of her sensations, and a task she sometimes had in restoring and toning them, after that sweet morning time in Rovio.

CHAPTER XVII

‘The princess Egeria’

London, say what we will of it, is after all the head of the British giant, and if not the liveliest in bubbles, it is past competition the largest broth-pot of brains anywhere simmering on the hob:  over the steadiest of furnaces too.  And the oceans and the continents, as you know, are perpetual and copious contributors, either to the heating apparatus or to the contents of the pot.  Let grander similes besought.  This one fits for the smoky receptacle cherishing millions, magnetic to tens of millions more, with its caked outside of grime, and the inward substance incessantly kicking the lid, prankish, but never casting it off.  A good stew, you perceive; not a parlous boiling.  Weak as we may be in our domestic cookery, our political has been sagaciously adjusted as yet to catch the ardours of the furnace without being subject to their volcanic activities.

That the social is also somewhat at fault, we have proof in occasional outcries over the absence of these or those particular persons famous for inspiriting.  It sticks and clogs.  The improvising songster is missed, the convivial essayist, the humorous Dean, the travelled cynic, and he, the one of his day, the iridescent Irishman, whose remembered repartees are a feast, sharp and ringing, at divers tables descending from the upper to the fat citizen’s, where, instead of coming in the sequence of talk, they are exposed by blasting, like fossil teeth of old Deluge sharks in monotonous walls of our chalk-quarries.  Nor are these the less welcome for the violence of their introduction among a people glad to be set burning rather briskly awhile by the most unexpected of digs in the ribs.  Dan Merion, to give an example.  That was Dan Merion’s joke with the watchman:  and he said that other thing to the Marquis of Kingsbury, when the latter asked him if he had ever won a donkey-race.  And old Dan is dead, and we are the duller for it! which leads to the question:  Is genius hereditary?  And the affirmative and negative are respectively maintained, rather against the Yes is the dispute, until a member of the audience speaks of Dan Merion’s having left a daughter reputed for a sparkling wit