she
felt humiliated, plucked violently from the throne where she had long
been sitting securely, very proudly. That was at an end. If she was
to be better than the loathsomest of hypocrites, she must deny him his
admission to the house. And then what was her life!

Something that was pressing her low, she knew not how, and left it
unquestioned, incited her to exaggerate the indignity her pride had
suffered. She was a dethroned woman. Deeper within, an unmasked actress,
she said. Oh, she forgave him! But clearly he took her for the same as
other women consenting to receive a privileged visitor. And sounding
herself to the soul, was she so magnificently better? Her face flamed.
She hugged her arms at her breast to quiet the beating, and dropped
them when she surprised herself embracing the memory. He had brought
political news, and treated her as--name the thing! Not designedly, it
might be: her position invited it. 'The world had given her to him.'
The world is always a prophet of the mire; but the world is no longer an
utterly mistaken world. She shook before it.

She asked herself why Percy or the world should think highly of an
adventuress, who was a denounced wife, a wretched author, and on the
verge of bankruptcy. She was an adventuress. When she held The Crossways
she had at least a bit of solid footing: now gone. An adventuress
without an idea in her head: witness her dullard, The Man of Two Minds,
at his work of sermonizing his mistress.

The tremendous pressure upon our consciousness of the material cause,
when we find ourselves cast among the breakers of moral difficulties
and endeavour to elude that mudvisaged monster, chiefly by feigning
unconsciousness, was an experience of Diana's, in the crisis to which
she was wrought. Her wits were too acute, her nature too direct, to
permit of a lengthened confusion. She laid the scourge on her flesh
smartly.--I gave him these privileges because I am weak as the weakest,
base as my enemies proclaim me. I covered my woman's vile weakness with
an air of intellectual serenity that he, choosing his moment, tore away,
exposing me to myself, as well as to him, the most ordinary of reptiles.
I kept up a costly household for the sole purpose of seeing him and
having him near me. Hence this bitter need of money!--Either it must be
money or disgrace. Money would assist her quietly to amend and complete
her work. Yes, and this want of money, in a review of the last two
years,