n of a puppet so unlike to
herself in reality, though identical in situation. That woman, reciting
her side of the case, gained a gradual resemblance to Danvers; she spoke
primly; perpetually the creature aired her handkerchief; she was bent on
softening those sugarloaves, the hard business-men applying to her
for facts. Facts were treated as unworthy of her; mere stuff of the
dustheap, mutton-bones, old shoes; she swam above them in a cocoon
of her spinning, sylphidine, unseizable; and between perplexing and
mollifying the slaves of facts, she saw them at their heels, a tearful
fry, abjectly imitative of her melodramatic performances. The spectacle
was presented of a band of legal gentlemen vociferating mightily for
swords and the onset, like the Austrian empress's Magyars, to vindicate
her just and holy cause. Our Law-courts failing, they threatened
Parliament, and for a last resort, the country! We are not going to be
the woman Warwick without a stir, my brethren.

Emma, an early riser that morning, for the purpose of a private
consultation with Mr. Redworth, found her lying placidly wakeful, to
judge by appearances.

'You have not slept, my dear child?'

'Perfectly,' said Diana, giving her hand and offering the lips. 'I'm
only having a warm morning bath in bed,' she added, in explanation of a
chill moisture that the touch of her exposed skin betrayed; for whatever
the fun of the woman Warwick, there had been sympathetic feminine
horrors in the frame of the sentient woman.

Emma fancied she kissed a quiet sufferer. A few remarks very soon set
her wildly laughing. Both were laughing when Danvers entered the room,
rather guilty, being late; and the sight of the prim-visaged maid she
had been driving among the lawyers kindled Diana's comic imagination
to such a pitch that she ran riot in drolleries, carrying her friend
headlong on the tide.

'I have not laughed so much since you were married,' said Emma.

'Nor I, dear; proving that the bar to it was the ceremony,' said Diana.

She promised to remain at Copsley three days. 'Then for the campaign
in Mr. Redworth's metropolis. I wonder whether I may ask him to get me
lodgings: a sitting-room and two bedrooms. The Crossways has a board up
for letting. I should prefer to be my own tenant; only it would give me
a hundred pounds more to get a substitute's money. I should like to be
at work writing instantly. Ink is my opium, and the pen my nigger, and
he must dig up go