Two or three questions ensued. Diana had to fortify
her fictitious objection by alluding to her maid’s
prattle of the household below; and she excused the
hapless, overfed, idle people of those regions.
To Emma it seemed a not unnatural sensitiveness.
She came to a settled resolve in her thoughts, as
she said, ’They want a change. London is
their element.’
Feeling that she deceived this true heart, however
lightly and necessarily, Diana warmed to her, forgiving
her at last for having netted and dragged her back
to front the enemy; an imposition of horrors, of which
the scene and the travelling with Redworth, the talking
of her case with her most intimate friend as well,
had been a distempering foretaste.
They stood up and kissed, parting for the night.
An odd world, where for the sin we have not participated
in we must fib and continue fibbing, she reflected.
She did not entirely cheat her clearer mind, for she
perceived that her step in flight had been urged both
by a weak despondency and a blind desperation; also
that the world of a fluid civilization is perforce
artificial. But her mind was in the background
of her fevered senses, and when she looked in the glass
and mused on uttering the word, ‘Liar!’
to the lovely image, her senses were refreshed, her
mind somewhat relieved, the face appeared so sovereignly
defiant of abasement.
Thus did a nature distraught by pain obtain some short
lull of repose. Thus, moreover, by closely reading
herself, whom she scourged to excess that she might
in justice be comforted, she gathered an increasing
knowledge of our human constitution, and stored matter
for the brain.
TOUCHING THE FIRST DAYS OF HER PROBATION
The result of her sleeping was, that Diana’s
humour, locked up overnight, insisted on an excursion,
as she lay with half-buried head and open eyelids,
thinking of the firm of lawyers she had to see; and
to whom, and to the legal profession generally, she
would be, under outward courtesies, nothing other
than ‘the woman Warwick.’ She pursued
the woman Warwick unmercifully through a series of
interviews with her decorous and crudely-minded defenders;
accurately perusing them behind their senior staidness.
Her scorching sensitiveness sharpened her intelligence
in regard to the estimate of discarded wives entertained
by men of business and plain men of the world, and
she drove the woman Warwick down their ranks, amazed
by the vision of a puppet so unlike to herself in reality,
though identical in situation. That woman, reciting
her side of the case, gained a gradual resemblance
to Danvers; she spoke primly; perpetually the creature
aired her handkerchief; she was bent on softening those
sugarloaves, the hard business-men applying to her
for facts. Facts were treated as unworthy of
her; mere stuff of the dustheap, mutton-bones, old
shoes; she swam above them in a cocoon of her spinning,
