repulsive. But I am
taken with a passion for reality.'

They spoke of the lawyers, and the calculated period of the trial; of
the husband too, in his inciting belief in the falseness of his wife.
'That is his excuse,' Diana said, her closed mouth meditatively dimpling
the comers over thoughts of his grounds for fury. He had them, though
none for the incriminating charge. The Sphinx mouth of the married woman
at war and at bay must be left unriddled. She and the law differed in
their interpretation of the dues of wedlock.

But matters referring to her case were secondary with Diana beside the
importance of her storing impressions. Her mind required to hunger for
something, and this Reality which frequently she was forced to loathe,
she forced herself proudly to accept, despite her youthfulness. Her
philosophy swallowed it in the lump, as the great serpent his meal; she
hoped to digest it sleeping likewise. Her visits of curiosity to the Law
Courts, where she stood spying and listening behind a veil, gave her a
great deal of tough substance to digest. There she watched the process
of the tortures to be applied to herself, and hardened her senses for
the ordeal. She saw there the ribbed and shanked old skeleton world on
which our fair fleshly is moulded. After all, your Fool's Paradise
is not a garden to grow in. Charon's ferry-boat is not thicker with
phantoms. They do not live in mind or soul. Chiefly women people it: a
certain class of limp men; women for the most part: they are sown there.
And put their garden under the magnifying glass of intimacy, what do we
behold? A world not better than the world it curtains, only foolisher.

Her conversations with Lady Dunstane brought her at last to the point of
her damped enthusiasm. She related an incident or two occurring in her
career of independence, and they discussed our state of civilization
plainly and gravely, save for the laughing peals her phrases
occasionally provoked; as when she named the intruders and disturbers of
solitarily-faring ladies, 'Cupid's footpads.' Her humour was created to
swim on waters where a prescribed and cultivated prudery should pretend
to be drowning.

'I was getting an exalted idea of English gentlemen, Emmy. "Rich and
rare were the gems she wore." I was ready to vow that one might traverse
the larger island similarly respected. I praised their chivalry. I
thought it a privilege to live in such a land. I cannot describe to you
how delig