She was Lady Wathin, and once on an afternoon’s call to see poor Lady Dunstane at her town-house, she had been introduced to Lady Pennon, a patroness of Mrs. Warwick, and had met a snub—­an icy check-bow of the aristocratic head from the top of the spinal column, and not a word, not a look; the half-turn of a head devoid of mouth and eyes!  She practised that forbidding checkbow herself to perfection, so the endurance of it was horrible.  A noli me tangere, her husband termed it, in his ridiculous equanimity; and he might term it what he pleased—­it was insulting.  The solace she had was in hearing that hideous Radical Revolutionary things were openly spoken at Mrs. Warwick’s evenings with her friends:—­impudently named ‘the elect of London.’  Pleasing to reflect upon Mrs. Warwick as undermining her supporters, to bring them some day down with a crash!  Her ‘elect of London’ were a queer gathering, by report of them!  And Mr. Whitmonby too, no doubt a celebrity, was the right-hand man at these dinner-parties of Mrs. Warwick.  Where will not men go to be flattered by a pretty woman!  He had declined repeated, successive invitations to Lady Wathin’s table.  But there of course he would not have had ‘the freedom’:  that is, she rejoiced in thinking defensively and offensively, a moral wall enclosed her topics.  The Hon. Percy Dacier had been brought to her Thursday afternoon by.  Mr. Quintin Manx, and he had one day dined with her; and he knew Mrs. Warwick—­a little, he said.  The opportunity was not lost to convey to him, entirely in the interest of sweet Constance Asper, that the moral world entertained a settled view of the very clever woman Mrs. Warwick certainly was.  He had asked Diana, on their morning walk to the station, whether she had an enemy:  so prone are men, educated by the Drama and Fiction in the belief that the garden of civilized life must be at the mercy of the old wild devourers, to fancy ‘villain whispers’ an indication of direct animosity.  Lady Wathin had no sentiment of the kind.

But she had become acquainted with the other side of the famous Dannisburgh case—­the unfortunate plaintiff; and compassion as well as morality moved her to put on a speaking air when Mr. Warwick’s name was mentioned.  She pictured him to the ladies of her circle as ’one of our true gentlemen in his deportment and his feelings.’  He was, she would venture to say, her ideal of an English gentleman.  ‘But now,’ she added commiseratingly, ‘ruined; ruined in his health and in his prospects.’  A lady inquired if it was the verdict that had thus affected him.  Lady Wathin’s answer was reported over moral, or substratum, London:  ’He is the victim of a fatal passion for his wife; and would take her back to-morrow were she to solicit his forgiveness.’  Morality had something to say against this active marital charity, attributable, it was to be feared, to weakness of character on the part of the husband.  Still Mrs. Warwick undoubtedly was one of those women