But matters referring to her case were secondary with Diana beside the importance of her storing impressions.  Her mind required to hunger for something, and this Reality which frequently she was forced to loathe, she forced herself proudly to accept, despite her youthfulness.  Her philosophy swallowed it in the lump, as the great serpent his meal; she hoped to digest it sleeping likewise.  Her visits of curiosity to the Law Courts, where she stood spying and listening behind a veil, gave her a great deal of tough substance to digest.  There she watched the process of the tortures to be applied to herself, and hardened her senses for the ordeal.  She saw there the ribbed and shanked old skeleton world on which our fair fleshly is moulded.  After all, your Fool’s Paradise is not a garden to grow in.  Charon’s ferry-boat is not thicker with phantoms.  They do not live in mind or soul.  Chiefly women people it:  a certain class of limp men; women for the most part:  they are sown there.  And put their garden under the magnifying glass of intimacy, what do we behold?  A world not better than the world it curtains, only foolisher.

Her conversations with Lady Dunstane brought her at last to the point of her damped enthusiasm.  She related an incident or two occurring in her career of independence, and they discussed our state of civilization plainly and gravely, save for the laughing peals her phrases occasionally provoked; as when she named the intruders and disturbers of solitarily-faring ladies, ‘Cupid’s footpads.’  Her humour was created to swim on waters where a prescribed and cultivated prudery should pretend to be drowning.

’I was getting an exalted idea of English gentlemen, Emmy.  “Rich and rare were the gems she wore.”  I was ready to vow that one might traverse the larger island similarly respected.  I praised their chivalry.  I thought it a privilege to live in such a land.  I cannot describe to you how delightful it was to me to walk out and home generally protected.  I might have been seriously annoyed but that one of the clerks-“articled,” he called himself—­of our lawyers happened to be by.  He offered to guard me, and was amusing with his modest tiptoe air.  No, I trust to the English common man more than ever.  He is a man of honour.  I am convinced he is matchless in any other country, except Ireland.  The English gentleman trades on his reputation.’

He was condemned by an afflicted delicacy, the sharpest of critical tribunals.

Emma bade her not to be too sweeping from a bad example.

‘It is not a single one,’ said Diana.  ’What vexes me and frets me is, that I must be a prisoner, or allow Danvers to mount guard.  And I can’t see the end of it.  And Danvers is no magician.  She seems to know her countrymen, though.  She warded one of them off, by saying to me:  “This is the crossing, my lady.”  He fled.’

Lady Dunstane affixed the popular title to the latter kind of gentleman.  She was irritated on her friend’s behalf, and against the worrying of her sisterhood, thinking in her heart, nevertheless, that the passing of a face and figure like Diana’s might inspire honourable emotions, pitiable for being hapless.