ed 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 w