ear friends, because the world is hypocrite! The
world cannot afford to be magnanimous, or even just.

Her dissensions with her husband, their differences of opinion, and puny
wranglings, hoistings of two standards, reconciliations for the sake
of decency, breaches of the truce, and his detested meanness, the
man behind the mask; and glimpses of herself too, the half-known,
half-suspected, developing creature claiming to be Diana, and unlike
her dreamed Diana, deformed by marriage, irritable, acerb, rebellious,
constantly justifiable against him, but not in her own mind, and
therefore accusing him of the double crime of provoking her and
perverting her--these were the troops defiling through her head while
she did battle with the hypocrite world.

One painful sting was caused by the feeling that she could have
loved--whom? An ideal. Had he, the imagined but unvisioned, been her
yoke-fellow, would she now lie raising caged-beast cries in execration
of the yoke? She would not now be seeing herself as hare, serpent,
tigress! The hypothesis was reviewed in negatives: she had barely a
sense of softness, just a single little heave of the bosom, quivering
upward and leadenly sinking, when she glanced at a married Diana
heartily mated. The regrets of the youthful for a life sailing away
under medical sentence of death in the sad eyes of relatives resemble
it. She could have loved. Good-bye to that!

A woman's brutallest tussle with the world was upon her. She was in
the arena of the savage claws, flung there by the man who of all others
should have protected her from them. And what had she done to deserve
it? She listened to the advocate pleading her case; she primed him to
admit the charges, to say the worst, in contempt of legal prudence, and
thereby expose her transparent honesty. The very things awakening a mad
suspicion proved her innocence. But was she this utterly simple person?
Oh, no! She was the Diana of the pride in her power of fencing with
evil--by no means of the order of those ninny young women who realize
the popular conception of the purely innocent. She had fenced and kept
her guard. Of this it was her angry glory to have the knowledge. But she
had been compelled to fence. Such are men in the world of facts, that
when a woman steps out of her domestic tangle to assert, because it is
a tangle, her rights to partial independence, they sight her for their
prey, or at least they complacently suppose her accessib