was her life!

Something that was pressing her low, she knew not how, and left it
unquestioned, incited her to exaggerate the indignity her pride had
suffered. She was a dethroned woman. Deeper within, an unmasked actress,
she said. Oh, she forgave him! But clearly he took her for the same as
other women consenting to receive a privileged visitor. And sounding
herself to the soul, was she so magnificently better? Her face flamed.
She hugged her arms at her breast to quiet the beating, and dropped them
when she surprised herself embracing the memory. He had brought political
news, and treated her as--name the thing! Not designedly, it might be:
her position invited it. 'The world had given her to him.' The world is
always a prophet of the mire; but the world is no longer an utterly
mistaken world. She shook before it.

She asked herself why Percy or the world should think highly of an
adventuress, who was a denounced wife, a wretched author, and on the
verge of bankruptcy. She was an adventuress. When she held The Crossways
she had at least a bit of solid footing: now gone. An adventuress without
an idea in her head: witness her dullard, The Man of Two Minds, at his
work of sermonizing his mistress.

The tremendous pressure upon our consciousness of the material cause,
when we find ourselves cast among the breakers of moral difficulties and
endeavour to elude that mudvisaged monster, chiefly by feigning
unconsciousness, was an experience of Diana's, in the crisis to which she
was wrought. Her wits were too acute, her nature too direct, to permit of
a lengthened confusion. She laid the scourge on her flesh smartly.--I
gave him these privileges because I am weak as the weakest, base as my
enemies proclaim me. I covered my woman's vile weakness with an air of
intellectual serenity that he, choosing his moment, tore away, exposing
me to myself, as well as to him, the most ordinary of reptiles. I kept up
a costly household for the sole purpose of seeing him and having him near
me. Hence this bitter need of money!--Either it must be money or
disgrace. Money would assist her quietly to amend and complete her work.
Yes, and this want of money, in a review of the last two years, was the
material cause of her recklessness. It was, her revived and uprising
pudency declared, the principal; the only cause. Mere want of money.

And she had a secret worth thousands! The secret of a day, no more:
anybody's secret after some four and