She had during a couple of weeks, besides the first fresh exercising of her pen, as well as the severe gratification of economy, a savage exultation in passing through the streets on foot and unknown.  Save for the plunges into the office of her solicitors, she could seem to herself a woman who had never submitted to the yoke.  What a pleasure it was, after finishing a number of pages, to start Eastward toward the lawyer-regions, full of imaginary cropping incidents, and from that churchyard Westward, against smoky sunsets, or in welcome fogs, an atom of the crowd!  She had an affection for the crowd.  They clothed her.  She laughed at the gloomy forebodings of Danvers concerning the perils environing ladies in the streets after dark alone.  The lights in the streets after dark and the quick running of her blood, combined to strike sparks of fancy and inspirit the task of composition at night.  This new, strange, solitary life, cut off from her adulatory society, both by the shock that made the abyss and by the utter foreignness, threw her in upon her natural forces, recasting her, and thinning away her memory of her past days, excepting girlhood, into the remote.  She lived with her girlhood as with a simple little sister.  They were two in one, and she corrected the dreams of the younger, protected and counselled her very sagely, advising her to love Truth and look always to Reality for her refreshment.  She was ready to say, that no habitable spot on our planet was healthier and pleasanter than London.  As to the perils haunting the head of Danvers, her experiences assured her of a perfect immunity from them; and the maligned thoroughfares of a great city, she was ready to affirm, contrasted favourably with certain hospitable halls.

The long-suffering Fates permitted her for a term to enjoy the generous delusion.  Subsequently a sweet surprise alleviated the shock she had sustained.  Emma Dunstane’s carriage was at her door, and Emma entered her sitting-room, to tell her of having hired a house in the neighbourhood, looking on the park.  She begged to have her for guest, sorrowfully anticipating the refusal.  At least they were to be near one another.

‘You really like this life in lodgings?’ asked Emma, to whom the stiff furniture and narrow apartments were a dreariness, the miserably small fire of the sitting-room an aspect of cheerless winter.

‘I do,’ said Diana; ‘yes,’ she added with some reserve, and smiled at her damped enthusiasm, ’I can eat when I like, walk, work—­and I am working!  My legs and my pen demand it.  Let me be independent!  Besides, I begin to learn something of the bigger world outside the one I know, and I crush my mincing tastes.  In return for that, I get a sense of strength I had not when I was a drawing-room exotic.  Much is repulsive.  But I am taken with a passion for reality.’

They spoke of the lawyers, and the calculated period of the trial; of the husband too, in his inciting belief in the falseness of his wife.  ’That is his excuse,’ Diana said, her closed mouth meditatively dimpling the comers over thoughts of his grounds for fury.  He had them, though none for the incriminating charge.  The Sphinx mouth of the married woman at war and at bay must be left unriddled.  She and the law differed in their interpretation of the dues of wedlock.