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 could have
loved--whom? An ideal. Had he, the imagined but unvisioned, been her
yoke-fellow, would she now lie raising caged-beast cries in execration of
the yoke? She would not now be seeing herself as hare, serpent, tigress!
The hypothesis was reviewed in negatives: she had barely a sense of
softness, just a single little heave of the bosom, quivering upward and
leadenly sinking, when she glanced at a married Diana heartily mated. The
regrets of the youthful for a life sailing away under medical sentence of
death in the sad eyes of relatives resemble it. She could have loved.
Good-bye to that!

A woman's brutallest tussle with the world was upon her. She was in the
arena of the savage claws, flung there by the man who of all others
should have protected her from them. And what had she done to deserve it?
She listened to the advocate pleading her case; she primed him to admit
the charges, to say the worst, in contempt of legal prudence, and thereby
expose her transparent honesty. The very things awakening a mad suspicion
proved her innocence. But was she this utterly simple person? Oh, no! She
was the Diana of the pride in her power of fencing with evil--by no means
of the order of those ninny young women who realize the popular
conception of the purely innocent. She had fenced and kept her guard. Of
this it was her angry glory to have the knowledge. But she had been
compelled to fence. Such are men in the world of facts, that when a woman
steps out of her domestic tangle to assert, because it is a tangle, her
rights to partial independence, they sight her for their prey, or at
least they complacently suppose her accessible. Wretched at home, a woman
ought to bury herself in her wretchedness, else may she be assured that
not the cleverest, wariest guard will cover her character.

Against the husband her cause was triumphant. Against herself she decided
not to plead it, for this reason, that the preceding Court, which was the
public and only positive one, had entirely and justly exonerated her. But
the holding of her hand by the friend half a minute too long for
friends