LITMIR.BIZ

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nodded. ‘I have.’

      ‘Can you resist her appeal to you?’

      ‘I must.’

      ‘She is not in a condition to bear it well. You will pardon me, Mrs. Warwick…’

      ‘Fully! Fully!’

      ‘I venture to offer merely practical advice. You have thought of it all, but have not felt it. In these cases, the one thing to do is to make a stand. Lady Dunstane has a clear head. She sees what has to be endured by you. Consider: she appeals to me to bring you her letter. Would she have chosen me, or any man, for her messenger, if it had not appeared to her a matter of life and death? You count me among your friends.’

      ‘One of the truest.’

      ‘Here are two, then, and your own good sense. For I do not believe it to be a question of courage.’

      ‘He has commenced. Let him carry it out,’ said Diana.

      Her desperation could have added the cry—And give me freedom! That was the secret in her heart. She had struck on the hope for the detested yoke to be broken at any cost.

      ‘I decline to meet his charges. I despise them. If my friends have faith in me—and they may!—I want nothing more.’

      ‘Well, I won’t talk commonplaces about the world,’ said Redworth. ‘We can none of us afford to have it against us. Consider a moment: to your friends you are the Diana Merion they knew, and they will not suffer an injury to your good name without a struggle. But if you fly? You leave the dearest you have to the whole brunt of it.

      ‘They will, if they love me.’

      ‘They will. But think of the shock to her. Lady Dunstane reads you—’

      ‘Not quite. No, not if she even wishes me to stay!’ said Diana.

      He was too intent on his pleading to perceive a signification.

      ‘She reads you as clearly in the dark as if you were present with her.’

      ‘Oh! why am I not ten years older!’ Diana cried, and tried to face round to him, and stopped paralyzed. ‘Ten years older, I could discuss my situation, as an old woman of the world, and use my wits to defend myself.’

      ‘And then you would not dream of flight before it!’

      ‘No, she does not read me: no! She saw that I might come to The Crossways. She—no one but myself can see the wisdom of my holding aloof, in contempt of this baseness.’

      ‘And of allowing her to sink under that which your presence would arrest. Her strength will not support it.’

      ‘Emma! Oh, cruel!’ Diana sprang up to give play to her limbs. She dropped on another chair. ‘Go I must, I cannot turn back. She saw my old attachment to this place. It was not difficult to guess… Who but I can see the wisest course for me!’

      ‘It comes to this, that the blow aimed at you in your absence will strike her, and mortally,’ said Redworth.

      ‘Then I say it is terrible to have a friend,’ said Diana, with her bosom heaving.

      ‘Friendship, I fancy, means one heart between two.’

      His unstressed observation hit a bell in her head, and set it reverberating. She and Emma had spoken, written, the very words. She drew forth her Emma’s letter from under her left breast, and read some half-blinded lines.

      Redworth immediately prepared to leave her to her feelings—trustier guides than her judgement in this crisis.

      ‘Adieu, for the night, Mrs. Warwick,’ he said, and was guilty of eulogizing the judgement he thought erratic for the moment. ‘Night is a calm adviser. Let me presume to come again in the morning. I dare not go back without you.’

      She looked up. As they faced together each saw that the other had passed through a furnace, scorching enough to him, though hers was the delicacy exposed. The reflection had its weight with her during the night.

      ‘Danvers is getting ready a bed for you; she is airing linen,’ Diana, said. But the bed was declined, and the hospitality was not pressed. The offer of it seemed to him significant of an unwary cordiality and thoughtlessness of tattlers that might account possibly for many things—supposing a fool or madman, or malignants, to interpret them.

      ‘Then, good night,’ said she.

      They joined hands. He exacted no promise that she would be present in the morning to receive him; and it was a consolation to her desire for freedom, until she reflected on the perfect confidence it implied, and felt as a quivering butterfly impalpably pinned.

      CHAPTER X. THE CONFLICT OF THE NIGHT

Her brain was a steam-wheel throughout the night; everything that could be thought of was tossed, nothing grasped

      The unfriendliness of the friends who sought to retain her recurred. For look—to fly could not be interpreted as a flight. It was but a stepping aside, a disdain of defending herself, and a wrapping herself in her dignity. Women would be with her. She called on the noblest of them to justify the course she chose, and they did, in an almost audible murmur.

      And O the rich reward. A black archway-gate swung open to the glittering fields of freedom.

      Emma was not of the chorus. Emma meditated as an invalid. How often had Emma bewailed to her that the most, grievous burden of her malady was her fatal tendency to brood sickly upon human complications! She could not see the blessedness of the prospect of freedom to a woman abominably yoked. What if a miserable woman were dragged through mire to reach it! Married, the mire was her portion, whatever she might do. That man—but pass him!

      And that other—the dear, the kind, careless, high-hearted old friend. He could honestly protest his guiltlessness, and would smilingly leave the case to go its ways. Of this she was sure, that her decision and her pleasure would be his. They were tied to the stake. She had already tasted some of the mortal agony. Did it matter whether the flames consumed her?

      Reflecting on the interview with Redworth, though she had performed her part in it placidly, her skin burned. It was the beginning of tortures if she stayed in England.

      By staying to defend herself she forfeited her attitude of dignity and lost all chance of her reward. And name the sort of world it is, dear friends, for which we are to sacrifice our one hope of freedom, that we may preserve our fair fame in it!

      Diana cried aloud, ‘My freedom!’ feeling as a butterfly flown out of a box to stretches of sunny earth beneath spacious heavens. Her bitter marriage, joyless in all its chapters, indefensible where the man was right as well as where insensately wrong, had been imprisonment. She excused him down to his last madness, if only the bonds were broken. Here, too, in this very house of her happiness with her father, she had bound herself to the man voluntarily, quite inexplicably. Voluntarily, as we say. But there must be a spell upon us at times. Upon young women there certainly is.

      The wild brain of Diana, armed by her later enlightenment as to the laws of life and nature, dashed in revolt at the laws of the world when she thought of the forces, natural and social, urging young women to marry and be bound to the end.

      It should be a spotless world which is thus ruthless.

      But were the world impeccable it would behave more generously.

      The world is ruthless, dear friends, because the world is hypocrite! The world cannot afford to be magnanimous, or even just.

      Her dissensions with her husband, their differences of opinion, and puny wranglings, hoistings of two standards, reconciliations for the sake of decency, breaches of the truce, and his detested meanness, the man behind the mask; and glimpses of herself too, the half-known, half-suspected, developing creature claiming to be Diana, and unlike her dreamed Diana, deformed by marriage, irritable, acerb, rebellious, constantly justifiable against him, but not in her own mind, and therefore accusing him of the double crime of provoking her and perverting her—these were the troops defiling through her head while she did battle with the hypocrite world.

      One painful sting was caused by the feeling that she

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