and press upon
their consciences. She resumed, in a rapid undertone: 'You know that a
certain degree of independence had been, if not granted by him, conquered
by me. I had the habit of it. Obedience with him is imprisonment--he is a
blind wall. He received a commission, greatly to his advantage, and was
absent. He seems to have received information of some sort. He returned
unexpectedly, at a late hour, and attacked me at once, middling violent.
My friend--and that he is! was coming from the House for a ten minutes'
talk, as usual, on his way home, to refresh him after the long sitting
and bear-baiting he had nightly to endure. Now let me confess: I grew
frightened; Mr. Warwick was "off his head," as they say-crazy, and I
could not bear the thought of those two meeting. While he raged I threw
open the window and put the lamp near it, to expose the whole
interior--cunning as a veteran intriguer: horrible, but it had to be done
to keep them apart. He asked me what madness possessed me, to sit by an
open window at midnight, in view of the public, with a damp wind blowing.
I complained of want of air and fanned my forehead. I heard the steps on
the pavement; I stung him to retort loudly, and I was relieved; the steps
passed on. So the trick succeeded--the trick! It was the worst I was
guilty of, but it was a trick, and it branded me trickster. It teaches me
to see myself with an abyss in my nature full of infernal possibilities.
I think I am hewn in black rock. A woman who can do as I did by instinct,
needs to have an angel always near her, if she has not a husband she
reveres.'

'We are none of us better than you, dear Tony; only some are more
fortunate, and many are cowards,' Emma said. 'You acted prudently in a
wretched situation, partly of your own making, partly of the
circumstances. But a nature like yours could not sit still and moan. That
marriage was to blame! The English notion of women seems to be that we
are born white sheep or black; circumstances have nothing to do with our
colour. They dread to grant distinctions, and to judge of us discerningly
is beyond them. Whether the fiction, that their homes are purer than
elsewhere, helps to establish the fact, I do not know: there is a class
that does live honestly; and at any rate it springs from a liking for
purity; but I am sure that their method of impressing it on women has the
dangers of things artificial. They narrow their understanding of human
nature, and t