whom he had accosted.  Her figure suggested pleasant features.  Either she was disappointed or she was an adept.  At the shutting of the gates she glided through, not without a fearful look around and at him.  She disappeared.  Dacier shrugged.  His novel assimilation to the rat-rabble of amatory intriguers tapped him on the shoulder unpleasantly.  A luckless member of the fraternity too!  The bell, the clock and the train gave him his title.  ’And I was ready to fling down everything for the woman!’ The trial of a superb London gentleman’s resources in the love-passion could not have been much keener.  No sign of her.

He who stands ready to defy the world, and is baffled by the absence of his fair assistant, is the fool doubled, so completely the fool that he heads the universal shout; he does not spare himself.  The sole consolation he has is to revile the sex.  Women! women!  Whom have they not made a fool of!  His uncle as much as any—­and professing to know them.  Him also! the man proud of escaping their wiles.  ’For this woman . . . !’ he went on saying after he had lost sight of her in her sex’s trickeries.  The nearest he could get to her was to conceive that the arrant coquette was now laughing at her utter subjugation and befooling of the man popularly supposed invincible.  If it were known of him!  The idea of his being a puppet fixed for derision was madly distempering.  He had only to ask the affirmative of Constance Asper to-morrow!  A vision of his determination to do it, somewhat comforted him.

Dacier walked up and down the platform, passing his pile of luggage, solitary and eloquent on the barrow.  Never in his life having been made to look a fool, he felt the red heat of the thing, as a man who has not blessedly become acquainted with the swish in boyhood finds his untempered blood turn to poison at a blow; he cannot healthily take a licking.  But then it had been so splendid an insanity when he urged Diana to fly with him.  Any one but a woman would have appreciated the sacrifice.

His luggage had to be removed.  He dropped his porter a lordly fee and drove home.  From that astonished solitude he strolled to his Club.  Curiosity mastering the wrath it was mixed with, he left his Club and crossed the park southward in the direction of Diana’s house, abusing her for her inveterate attachment to the regions of Westminster.  There she used to receive Lord Dannisburgh; innocently, no doubt-assuredly quite innocently; and her husband had quitted the district.  Still it was rather childish for a woman to-be always haunting the seats of Parliament.  Her disposition to imagine that she was able to inspire statesmen came in for a share of ridicule; for when we know ourselves to be ridiculous, a retort in kind, unjust upon consideration, is balm.  The woman dragged him down to the level of common men; that was the peculiar injury, and it swept her undistinguished into the stream of women.  In appearance, as he had proved to the fellows at his Club, he was perfectly self-possessed, mentally distracted and bitter, hating himself for it, snapping at the cause of it.  She had not merely disappointed, she had slashed his high conceit of himself, curbed him at the first animal dash forward, and he champed the bit with the fury of a thwarted racer.