some conception
of her spirit. He drove into the streets, desiring, half determining, to
risk a drive back on the morrow.

The cold light of the morrow combined with his fear of distressing her
to restrain him. Perhaps he thought it well not to risk his gains. He
was a northerner in blood. He may have thought it well not further to
run the personal risk immediately.

CHAPTER XXIII. RECORDS A VISIT TO DIANA FROM ONE OF THE WORLD'S GOOD
WOMEN

Pure disengagement of contemplativeness had selected. Percy Dacier as
the model of her YOUNG MINISTER OF STATE, Diana supposed. Could she
otherwise have dared to sketch him? She certainly would not have done it
now.

That was a reflection similar to what is entertained by one who has
dropped from a precipice to the midway ledge over the abyss,
where caution of the whole sensitive being is required for simple
self-preservation. How could she have been induced to study and portray
him! It seemed a form of dementia.

She thought this while imagining the world to be interrogating her.
When she interrogated herself, she flew to Lugano and her celestial
Salvatore, that she might be defended from a charge of the dreadful
weakness of her sex. Surely she there had proof of her capacity for pure
disengagement. Even in recollection the springs of spiritual happiness
renewed the bubbling crystal play. She believed that a divineness had
wakened in her there, to strengthen her to the end, ward her from any
complicity in her sex's culprit blushing.

Dacier's cry of her name was the cause, she chose to think, of the
excessive circumspection she must henceforth practise; precariously
footing, embracing hardest earth, the plainest rules, to get back
to safety. Not that she was personally endangered, or at least not
spiritually; she could always fly in soul to her heights. But she had
now to be on guard, constantly in the fencing attitude. And watchful of
herself as well. That was admitted with a ready frankness, to save
it from being a necessitated and painful confession: for the
voluntary-acquiescence, if it involved her in her sex, claimed an
individual exemption. 'Women are women, and I am a woman but I am I,
and unlike them: I see we are weak, and weakness tempts: in owning the
prudence of guarded steps, I am armed. It is by dissembling, feigning
immunity, that we are imperilled.' She would have phrased it so, with
some anger at her feminine nature as well as at the subjection force