not why.

Lady Dunstane was as indefatigable by day as by night in the business of
acting goddess to her beloved Tony, whom she assured that the service,
instead of exhausting, gave her such healthfulness as she had imagined
herself to have lost for ever. The word was passed, and invitations
poured in to choice conversational breakfasts, private afternoon
concerts, all the humming season's assemblies. Mr. Warwick's treatment
of his wife was taken by implication for lunatic; wherever she was heard
or seen, he had no case; a jury of some hundreds of both sexes, ready to
be sworn, pronounced against him. Only the personal enemies of the lord
in the suit presumed to doubt, and they exercised the discretion of a
minority.

But there is an upper middle class below the aristocratic, boasting an
aristocracy of morals, and eminently persuasive of public opinion,
if not commanding it. Previous to the relaxation, by amendment, of a
certain legal process, this class was held to represent the austerity
of the country. At present a relaxed austerity is represented; and still
the bulk of the members are of fair repute, though not quite on the
level of their pretensions. They were then, while more sharply divided
from the titular superiors they are socially absorbing, very powerful
to brand a woman's character, whatever her rank might be; having
innumerable agencies and avenues for that high purpose, to say nothing
of the printing-press. Lady Dunstane's anxiety to draw them over to the
cause of her friend set her thinking of the influential Mrs. Cramborne
Wathin, with whom she was distantly connected; the wife of a potent
serjeant-at-law fast mounting to the Bench and knighthood; the centre of
a circle, and not strangely that, despite her deficiency in the arts
and graces, for she had wealth and a cook, a husband proud of his
wine-cellar, and the ambition to rule; all the rewards, together with
the expectations, of the virtuous. She was a lady of incisive features
bound in stale parchment. Complexion she had none, but she had
spotlessness of skin, and sons and daughters just resembling her, like
cheaper editions of a precious quarto of a perished type. You discerned
the imitation of the type, you acknowledged the inferior compositor.
Mr. Cramborne Wathin was by birth of a grade beneath his wife; he
sprang (behind a curtain of horror) from tradesmen. The Bench was in
designation for him to wash out the stain, but his children suffered