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 hurries over the forms of a brial to sign the execution-warrant that makes it feel like justice.  You will see.  She cannot forgive me for not pretending to enter into her enthusiasm.  She will make him believe I conspired against her.  Men in love are children with their mistresses—­the greatest of them; their heads are under the woman’s feet.  What have I not done to aid him!  At his instance, I went to the archbishop, to implore one of the princes of the Church for succour.  I knelt to an ecclesiastic.