to their means.
An inspector of sea worthy ships proceeds in like manner. Whence would
the money come? He could not help the bent of his mind; but he could
avoid subjecting her to the talismanic touch. The girl at the Dublin
Ball, the woman at the fire-grate of The Crossways, both in one were his
Diana. Now and then, hearing an ugly whisper, his manful sympathy with
the mere woman in her imprisoned liberty, defended her desperately from
charges not distinctly formulated within him:--'She's not made of stone.'
That was a height of self-abnegation to shake the poor fellow to his
roots; but, then, he had no hopes of his own; and he stuck to it. Her
choice of a man like Dacier, too, of whom Redworth judged highly, showed
nobility. She irradiated the man; but no baseness could be in such an
alliance. If allied, they were bound together for good. The
tie--supposing a villain world not wrong--was only not the sacred tie
because of impediments. The tie!--he deliberated, and said stoutly--No.
Men of Redworth's nature go through sharp contests, though the duration
of them is short, and the tussle of his worship of this woman with the
materialistic turn of his mind was closed by the complete shutting up of
the latter under lock and bar; so that a man, very little of an idealist,
was able to sustain her in the pure imagination--where she did almost
belong to him. She was his, in a sense, because she might have been
his--but for an incredible extreme of folly. The dark ring of the eclipse
cast by some amazing foolishness round the shining crescent perpetually
in secret claimed the whole sphere of her, by what might have been, while
admitting her lost to him in fact. To Thomas Redworth's mind the lack of
perfect sanity in his conduct at any period of manhood, was so entirely
past belief that he flew at the circumstances confirming the charge, and
had wrestles with the angel of reality, who did but set him dreaming
backward, after flinging him.

He heard at Lady Wathin's that Mrs. Warwick was in town for the winter.
'Mr. Dacier is also in town,' Lady Wathin said, with an acid indication
of the needless mention of it. 'We have not seen him.' She invited
Redworth to meet a few friends at dinner. 'I think you admire Miss Asper:
in my idea a very saint among young women;--and you know what the young
women of our day are. She will be present. She is, you are aware,
England's greatest heiress. Only yesterday, hearing of that poor man Mr.
Wa