one of those journals, now barely credible, dedicated to the putrid of the upper circle, wherein initials raised sewer-lamps, and Asmodeus lifted a roof, leering hideously.  Thousands detested it, and fattened their crops on it.  Domesticated beasts of superior habits to the common will indulge themselves with a luxurious roll in carrion, for a revival of their original instincts.  Society was largely a purchaser.  The ghastly thing was dreaded as a scourge, hailed as a refreshment, nourished as a parasite.  It professed undaunted honesty, and operated in the fashion of the worms bred of decay.  Success was its boasted justification.  The animal world, when not rigorously watched, will always crown with success the machine supplying its appetites.  The old dog-world took signal from it.  The one-legged devil-god waved his wooden hoof, and the creatures in view, the hunt was uproarious.  Why should we seem better than we are? down with hypocrisy, cried the censor morum, spicing the lamentable derelictions of this and that great person, male and female.  The plea of corruption of blood in the world, to excuse the public chafing of a grievous itch, is not less old than sin; and it offers a merry day of frisky truant running to the animal made unashamed by another and another stripped, branded, and stretched flat.  Sir Lukin read of Mr. and Mrs. W. and a distinguished Peer of the realm.  The paragraph was brief; it had a flavour.  Promise of more to come, pricked curiosity.  He read it enraged, feeling for his wife; and again indignant, feeling for Diana.  His third reading found him out:  he felt for both, but as a member of the whispering world, much behind the scenes, he had a longing for the promised insinuations, just to know what they could say, or dared say.  The paper was not shown to Lady Dunstane.  A run to London put him in the tide of the broken dam of gossip.  The names were openly spoken and swept from mouth to mouth of the scandalmongers, gathering matter as they flew.  He knocked at Diana’s door, where he was informed that the mistress of the house was absent.  More than official gravity accompanied the announcement.  Her address was unknown.  Sir Lukin thought it now time to tell his wife.  He began with a hesitating circumlocution, in order to prepare her mind for bad news.  She divined immediately that it concerned Diana, and forcing him to speak to the point, she had the story jerked out to her in a sentence.  It stopped her heart.

The chill of death was tasted in that wavering ascent from oblivion to recollection.  Why had not Diana come to her, she asked herself, and asked her husband; who, as usual, was absolutely unable to say.  Under compulsory squeezing, he would have answered, that she did not come because she could not fib so easily to her bosom friend:  and this he thought, notwithstanding his personal experience of Diana’s generosity.  But he had other personal experiences of her sex, and her sex plucked at the bright star and drowned it.