another woman would be senseless. In the discovery of her baseness, she
had made a poor figure. Doubtless during the afternoon she had trimmed
her intuitive Belial art of making 'the worse appear the better cause':
queer to peruse, and instructive in an unprofitable department of
knowledge-the tricks of the sex.

He said to himself, with little intuition of the popular taste: She
wouldn't be a bad heroine of Romance! He said it derisively of the
Romantic. But the right worshipful heroine of Romance was the front-face
female picture he had won for his walls. Poor Diana was the flecked
heroine of Reality: not always the same; not impeccable; not an
ignorant-innocent, nor a guileless: good under good leading; devoted to
the death in a grave crisis; often wrestling with her terrestrial nature
nobly; and a growing soul; but not one whose purity was carved in marble
for the assurance to an Englishman that his possession of the changeless
thing defies time and his fellows, is the pillar of his home and
universally enviable. Your fair one of Romance cannot suffer a mishap
without a plotting villain, perchance many of them; to wreak the dread
iniquity: she cannot move without him; she is the marble block, and if
she is to have a feature, he is the sculptor; she depends on him for
life, and her human history at least is married to him far more than
to the rescuing lover. No wonder, then, that men should find her thrice
cherishable featureless, or with the most moderate possible indication
of a countenance. Thousands of the excellent simple creatures do; and
every reader of her tale. On the contrary, the heroine of Reality is
that woman whom you have met or heard of once in your course of years,
and very probably despised for bearing in her composition the motive
principle; at best, you say, a singular mixture of good and bad;
anything but the feminine ideal of man. Feature to some excess, you
think, distinguishes her. Yet she furnishes not any of the sweet sensual
excitement pertaining to her spotless rival pursued by villany. She
knocks at the doors of the mind, and the mind must open to be interested
in her. Mind and heart must be wide open to excuse her sheer descent
from the pure ideal of man.

Dacier's wandering reflections all came back in crowds to the judicial
Bench of the Black Cap. He felt finely, apart from the treason, that her
want of money degraded her: him too, by contact. Money she might have
had to any extent: u