as of a man in
calculation; they put it down to an ambitious mind. Yet Diana said then,
and said always, that it was he who had first taught her the art of
observing. On the whole, the brilliant marriage seemed a fairer prospect
for her; how reasonable to anticipate, Lady Dunstane often thought when
admiring the advance of Diana's beauty in queenliness, for never did
woman carry her head more grandly, more thrillingly make her presence
felt; and if only she had been an actress showing herself nightly on
a London stage, she would before now have met the superb appreciation,
melancholy to reflect upon!

Diana regained her happy composure at Copsley. She had, as she imagined,
no ambition. The dulness of the place conveyed a charm to a nature
recovering from disturbance to its clear smooth flow. Air, light, books,
and her friend, these good things she had; they were all she wanted. She
rode, she walked, with Sir Lukin or Mr. Redworth, for companion; or with
Saturday and Sunday guests, Lord Larrian, her declared admirer, among
them. 'Twenty years younger!' he said to her, shrugging, with a merry
smile drawn a little at the corners to sober sourness; and she vowed
to her friend that she would not have had the heart to refuse him.
'Though,' said she, 'speaking generally, I cannot tell you what a
foreign animal a husband would appear in my kingdom.' Her experience
had wakened a sexual aversion, of some slight kind, enough to make her
feminine pride stipulate for perfect independence, that she might have
the calm out of which imagination spreads wing. Imagination had become
her broader life, and on such an earth, under such skies, a husband
who is not the fountain of it, certainly is a foreign animal: he is a
discordant note. He contracts the ethereal world, deadens radiancy.
He is gross fact, a leash, a muzzle, harness, a hood; whatever is
detestable to the free limbs and senses. It amused Lady Dunstane to hear
Diana say, one evening when their conversation fell by hazard on her
future, that the idea of a convent was more welcome to her than the most
splendid marriage. 'For,' she added, 'as I am sure I shall never know
anything of this love they rattle about and rave about, I shall do well
to keep to my good single path; and I have a warning within me that a
step out of it will be a wrong one--for me, dearest!'

She wished her view of the yoke to be considered purely personal, drawn
from no examples and comparisons. The excel