CHAPTER XXIII

RECORDS A VISIT TO DIANA FROM ONE OF THE WORLD’S GOOD WOMEN

Pure disengagement of contemplativeness had selected.  Percy Dacier as the model of her young Minister of state, Diana supposed.  Could she otherwise have dared to sketch him?  She certainly would not have done it now.

That was a reflection similar to what is entertained by one who has dropped from a precipice to the midway ledge over the abyss, where caution of the whole sensitive being is required for simple self-preservation.  How could she have been induced to study and portray him!  It seemed a form of dementia.

She thought this while imagining the world to be interrogating her.  When she interrogated herself, she flew to Lugano and her celestial Salvatore, that she might be defended from a charge of the dreadful weakness of her sex.  Surely she there had proof of her capacity for pure disengagement.  Even in recollection the springs of spiritual happiness renewed the bubbling crystal play.  She believed that a divineness had wakened in her there, to strengthen her to the end, ward her from any complicity in her sex’s culprit blushing.

Dacier’s cry of her name was the cause, she chose to think, of the excessive circumspection she must henceforth practise; precariously footing, embracing hardest earth, the plainest rules, to get back to safety.  Not that she was personally endangered, or at least not spiritually; she could always fly in soul to her heights.  But she had now to be on guard, constantly in the fencing attitude.  And watchful of herself as well.  That was admitted with a ready frankness, to save it from being a necessitated and painful confession:  for the voluntary-acquiescence, if it involved her in her sex, claimed an individual exemption.  ’Women are women, and I am a woman but I am I, and unlike them:  I see we are weak, and weakness tempts:  in owning the prudence of guarded steps, I am armed.  It is by dissembling, feigning immunity, that we are imperilled.’  She would have phrased it so, with some anger at her feminine nature as well as at the subjection forced on her by circumstances.

Besides, her position and Percy Dacier’s threw the fancied danger into remoteness.  The world was her stepmother, vigilant to become her judge; and the world was his taskmaster, hopeful of him, yet able to strike him down for an offence.  She saw their situation as he did.  The course of folly must be bravely taken, if taken at all:  Disguise degraded her to the reptiles.

This was faced.  Consequently there was no fear of it.

She had very easily proved that she had skill and self-possession to keep him rational, and therefore they could continue to meet.  A little outburst of frenzy to a reputably handsome woman could be treated as the froth of a passing wave.  Men have the trick, infants their fevers.