eign impression which was her security. And hope had become a flame
in her bosom that would no longer take the common extinguisher. The race
she ran was with a shrouded figure no more, but with the figure of the
shroud; she had to summon paroxysms of a pity hard to feel, images of
sickness, helplessness, the vaults, the last human silence for the
stilling of her passionate heart. And when this was partly effected, the
question, Am I going to live? renewed her tragical struggle. Who was it
under the vaults, in the shroud, between the planks? and with human
sensibility to swell the horror! Passion whispered of a vaster sorrow
needed for herself; and the hope conjuring those frightful complexities
was needed to soothe her. She pitied the man, but she was an enamoured
woman. Often of late she had been sharply stung, relaxed as well, by the
observations of Danvers assisting at her toilette. Had she beauty and
charm, beauty and rich health in the young summer blooming of her
days?--and all doomed to waste? No insurgency of words arose in
denunciation of the wrong done to her nature. An undefined heavy feeling
of wrong there was, just perceptive enough to let her know, without
gravely shaming, that one or another must be slain for peace to come; for
it is the case in which the world of the Laws overloading her is pitiless
to women, deaf past ear-trumpets, past intercession; detesting and
reviling them for a feeble human cry, and for one apparent step of revolt
piling the pelted stones on them. It will not discriminate shades of hue,
it massacres all the shadowed. They are honoured, after a fashion, at a
certain elevation. Descending from it, and purely to breathe common air
(thus in her mind), they are scourged and outcast. And alas! the very
pleading for them excites a sort of ridicule in their advocate. How? She
was utterly, even desperately, nay personally, earnest, and her humour
closed her lips; though comical views of the scourged and outcast coming
from the opposite party--the huge bully world--she would not have
tolerated. Diana raged at a prevailing strength on the part of that huge
bully world, which seemed really to embrace the atmosphere. Emma had
said: 'The rules of Christian Society are a blessed Government for us
women. We owe it so much that there is not a brick of the fabric we
should not prop.' Emma's talk of obedience to the Laws, being Laws, was
repeated by the rebel, with an involuntary unphrased comparison o