rned aside to visit the baroness.

Lucie, Baroness von Crefeldt, was one of those persons who, after a
probationary term in the character of woman, have become men, but of
whom offended man, amazed by the flowering up of that hard rough jaw
from the tender blooming promise of a petticoat, finds it impossible to
imagine they had once on a sweet Spring time the sex's gentleness and
charm of aspect. Mistress Flanders, breeched and hatted like a man,
pulling at the man's short pipe and heartily invoking frouzy deities,
committing a whole sackful of unfeminine etcaetera, is an impenetrable
wall to her maiden past; yet was there an opening day when nothing of us
moustached her. She was a clear-faced girl and mother of young
blushes before the years were at their work of transformation upon her
countenance and behind her bosom. The years were rough artists: perhaps
she was combative, and fought them for touching her ungallantly; and
that perhaps was her first manly step. Baroness Lucie was of high birth,
a wife openly maltreated, a woman of breeding, but with a man's head,
capable of inspiring man-like friendships, and of entertaining them. She
was radically-minded, strongly of the Radical profession of faith, and
a correspondent of revolutionary chiefs; both the trusted adviser and
devoted slave of him whose future glorious career she measured by
his abilities. Rumour blew out a candle and left the wick to smoke
in relation to their former intercourse. The Philistines revenged
themselves on an old aristocratic Radical and a Jew demagogue with the
weapon that scandal hands to virtue. They are virtuous or nothing, and
they must show that they are so when they can; and best do they show it
by publicly dishonouring the friendship of a man and a woman; for to
be in error in malice does not hurt them, but they profoundly feel that
they are fools if they are duped.

She was aware of the recent course of events; she had as she protested,
nothing to accuse herself of, and she could hardly part her lips without
a self-exculpation.

'It will fall on me!' she said to Tresten, in her emphatic tone. 'He
will have his interview with the girl. He will subdue the girl. He will
manacle himself in the chains he makes her wear. She will not miss her
chance! I am the object of her detestation. I am the price paid for
their reconcilement. She will seize her opportunity to vilipend me, and
I shall be condemned by the kind of court-martial which h