ever spent at home.  She had no intimate understanding of the deadly wrestle of the conventional woman with her nature which she was undergoing below the surface.  Perplexities she acknowledged, and the prudence of guardedness.  ’But as I am sure not to live very long, we may as well meet.’  Her meetings with Percy Dacier were therefore hardly shunned; and his behaviour did not warn her to discountenance them.  It would have been cruel to exclude him from her select little dinners of eight.  Whitmonby, Westlake, Henry Wilmers and the rest, she perhaps aiding, schooled him in the conversational art.  She heard it said of him, that the courted discarder of the sex, hitherto a mere politician, was wonderfully humanized.  Lady Pennon fell to talking of him hopefully.  She declared him to be one of the men who unfold tardily, and only await the mastering passion.  If the passion had come, it was controlled.  His command of himself melted Diana.  How could she forbid his entry to the houses she frequented?  She was glad to see him.  He showed his pleasure in seeing her.  Remembering his tentative indiscretion on those foreign sands, she reflected that he had been easily checked:  and the like was not to be said of some others.  Beautiful women in her position provoke an intemperateness that contrasts touchingly with the self-restraint of a particular admirer.  Her ‘impassioned Caledonian’ was one of a host, to speak of whom and their fits of lunacy even to her friend Emma, was repulsive.  She bore with them, foiled them, passed them, and recovered her equanimity; but the contrast called to her to dwell on it, the self-restraint whispered of a depth of passion . . . .

She was shocked at herself for a singular tremble ’she experienced, without any beating of the heart, on hearing one day that the marriage of Percy Dacier and Miss Asper was at last definitely fixed.  Mary Paynham brought her the news.  She had it from a lady who had come across Miss Asper at Lady Wathin’s assemblies, and considered the great heiress extraordinarily handsome.

‘A golden miracle,’ Diana gave her words to say.  ’Good looks and gold together are rather superhuman.  The report may be this time true.’  Next afternoon the card of Lady Wathin requested Mrs. Warwick to grant her a private interview.

Lady Wathin, as one of the order of women who can do anything in a holy cause, advanced toward Mrs. Warwick, unabashed by the burden of her mission, and spinally prepared, behind benevolent smilings, to repay dignity of mien with a similar erectness of dignity.  They touched fingers and sat.  The preliminaries to the matter of the interview were brief between ladies physically sensible of antagonism and mutually too scornful of subterfuges in one another’s presence to beat the bush.

Lady Wathin began.  ’I am, you are aware, Mrs. Warwick, a cousin of your friend Lady Dunstane.’

‘You come to me on business?’ Diana said.