e lost all shame in playing the churlish
domestic tyrant. The instances are incredible of a gentleman. Perry
Wilkinson gives us two or three; one on the authority of a personal
friend who witnessed the scene; at the Warwick whist-table, where the
fair Diana would let loose her silvery laugh in the intervals. She
was hardly out of her teens, and should have been dancing instead of
fastened to a table. A difference of fifteen years in the ages of the
wedded pair accounts poorly for the husband's conduct, however solemn
a business the game of whist. We read that he burst out at last, with
bitter mimicry, 'yang--yang--yang!' and killed the bright laugh, shot
it dead. She had outraged the decorum of the square-table only while
the cards were making. Perhaps her too-dead ensuing silence, as of one
striving to bring back the throbs to a slain bird in her bosom, allowed
the gap between the wedded pair to be visible, for it was dated back to
prophecy as soon as the trumpet proclaimed it.

But a multiplication of similar instances, which can serve no other
purpose than that of an apology, is a miserable vindication of
innocence. The more we have of them the darker the inference. In
delicate situations the chatterer is noxious. Mrs. Warwick had numerous
apologists. Those trusting to her perfect rectitude were rarer. The
liberty she allowed herself in speech and action must have been trying
to her defenders in a land like ours; for here, and able to throw
its shadow on our giddy upper-circle, the rigour of the game of life,
relaxed though it may sometimes appear, would satisfy the staidest
whist-player. She did not wish it the reverse, even when claiming a
space for laughter: 'the breath of her soul,' as she called it, and as
it may be felt in the early youth of a lively nature. She, especially,
with her multitude of quick perceptions and imaginative avenues, her
rapid summaries, her sense of the comic, demanded this aerial freedom.

We have it from Perry Wilkinson that the union of the divergent couple
was likened to another union always in a Court of Law. There was a
distinction; most analogies will furnish one; and here we see England
and Ireland changeing their parts, until later, after the breach, when
the Englishman and Irishwoman resumed a certain resemblance to the yoked
Islands.

Henry Wilmers, I have said, deals exclusively with the wit and charm of
the woman. He treats the scandal as we might do in like manner if her