not known.'

Two or three questions ensued. Diana had to fortify her fictitious
objection by alluding to her maid's prattle of the household below; and
she excused the hapless, overfed, idle people of those regions.

To Emma it seemed a not unnatural sensitiveness. She came to a settled
resolve in her thoughts, as she said, 'They want a change. London is
their element.'

Feeling that she deceived this true heart, however lightly and
necessarily, Diana warmed to her, forgiving her at last for having
netted and dragged her back to front the enemy; an imposition of
horrors, of which the scene and the travelling with Redworth, the
talking of her case with her most intimate friend as well, had been a
distempering foretaste.

They stood up and kissed, parting for the night.

An odd world, where for the sin we have not participated in we must
fib and continue fibbing, she reflected. She did not entirely cheat her
clearer mind, for she perceived that her step in flight had been urged
both by a weak despondency and a blind desperation; also that the world
of a fluid civilization is perforce artificial. But her mind was in the
background of her fevered senses, and when she looked in the glass and
mused on uttering the word, 'Liar!' to the lovely image, her senses were
refreshed, her mind somewhat relieved, the face appeared so sovereignly
defiant of abasement.

Thus did a nature distraught by pain obtain some short lull of repose.
Thus, moreover, by closely reading herself, whom she scourged to excess
that she might in justice be comforted, she gathered an increasing
knowledge of our human constitution, and stored matter for the brain.

CHAPTER XIII. TOUCHING THE FIRST DAYS OF HER PROBATION

The result of her sleeping was, that Diana's humour, locked up
overnight, insisted on an excursion, as she lay with half-buried head
and open eyelids, thinking of the firm of lawyers she had to see; and to
whom, and to the legal profession generally, she would be, under outward
courtesies, nothing other than 'the woman Warwick.' She pursued the
woman Warwick unmercifully through a series of interviews with her
decorous and crudely-minded defenders; accurately perusing them behind
their senior staidness. Her scorching sensitiveness sharpened her
intelligence in regard to the estimate of discarded wives entertained
by men of business and plain men of the world, and she drove the woman
Warwick down their ranks, amazed by the visio