y in opinion, when the habit of
thinking of him as Mr. Redworth would be best. Women are bound to such
small observances, and especially the beautiful of the sisterhood, whom
the world soon warns that they carry explosives and must particularly
guard against the ignition of petty sparks. She was less indiscreet
in her thoughts than in her acts, as is the way with the reflective
daughter of impulse; though she had fine mental distinctions: what she
could offer to do 'spirit to spirit,' for instance, held nothing to
her mind of the intimacy of calling the gentleman plain Tom in mere
contemplation of him. Her friend and champion was a volunteer, far
from a mercenary, and he deserved the reward, if she could bestow it
unalarmed. They were to meet in Egypt. Meanwhile England loomed the home
of hostile forces ready to shock, had she been a visible planet, and
ready to secrete a virus of her past history, had she been making new.

She was happily away, borne by a whiter than swan's wing on the sapphire
Mediterranean. Her letters to Emma were peeps of splendour for the
invalid: her way of life on board the yacht, and sketches of her host
and hostess as lovers in wedlock on the other side of our perilous
forties; sketches of the bays, the towns, the people-priests,
dames, cavaliers, urchins, infants, shifting groups of supple
southerners-flashed across the page like a web of silk, and were dashed
off, redolent of herself, as lightly as the silvery spray of the blue
waves she furrowed; telling, without allusions to the land behind her,
that she had dipped in the wells of blissful oblivion. Emma Dunstane, as
is usual with those who receive exhilarating correspondence from makers
of books, condemned the authoress in comparison, and now first saw that
she had the gift of writing. Only one cry: 'Italy, Eden of exiles!'
betrayed the seeming of a moan. She wrote of her poet and others
immediately. Thither had they fled; with adieu to England!

How many have waved the adieu! And it is England nourishing, England
protecting them, England clothing them in the honours they wear. Only
the posturing lower natures, on the level of their buskins, can pluck
out the pocket-knife of sentimental spite to cut themselves loose from
her at heart in earnest. The higher, bleed as they may, too pressingly
feel their debt. Diana had the Celtic vivid sense of country. In England
she was Irish, by hereditary, and by wilful opposition. Abroad, gazing
along