I should have said in younger days, because it will not look plainly on our nature and try to reconcile it with our conditions.  But now I see that the sin is cowardice.  The more I know of the world the more clearly I perceive that its top and bottom sin is cowardice, physically and morally alike.  Lord Larrian owns to there being few heroes in an army.  We must fawn in society.  What is the meaning of that dread of one example of tolerance?  O my dear! let us give it the right name.  Society is the best thing we have, but it is a crazy vessel worked by a crew that formerly practised piracy, and now, in expiation, professes piety, fearful of a discovered Omnipotence, which is in the image of themselves and captain.  Their old habits are not quite abandoned, and their new one is used as a lash to whip the exposed of us for a propitiation of the capricious potentate whom they worship in the place of the true God.’

Lady Dunstane sniffed.  ‘I smell the leading article.’

Diana joined with her smile, ‘No, the style is rather different.’

‘Have you not got into a trick of composing in speaking, at times?’

Diana confessed, ’I think I have at times.  Perhaps the daily writing of all kinds and the nightly talking . . .  I may be getting strained.’

’No, Tony; but longer visits in the country to me would refresh you.  I miss your lighter touches.  London is a school, but, you know it, not a school for comedy nor for philosophy; that is gathered on my hills, with London distantly in view, and then occasional descents on it well digested.’

‘I wonder whether it is affecting me !’ said Diana, musing.  ’A metropolitan hack! and while thinking myself free, thrice harnessed; and all my fun gone.  Am I really as dull as a tract, my dear?  I must be, or I should be proving the contrary instead of asking.  My pitfall is to fancy I have powers equal to the first look-out of the eyes of the. morning.  Enough of me.  We talked of Mary Paynham.  If only some right good man would marry her!’

Lady Dunstane guessed at the right good man in Diana’s mind.  ’Do you bring them together?’

Diana nodded, and then shook doleful negatives to signify no hope.

‘None whatever—­if we mean the same person,’ said Lady Dunstane, bethinking her, in the spirit of wrath she felt at such a scheme being planned by Diana to snare the right good man, that instead of her own true lover Redworth, it might be only Percy Dacier.  So filmy of mere sensations are these little ideas as they flit in converse, that she did not reflect on her friend’s ignorance of Redworth’s love of her, or on the unlikely choice of one in Dacier’s high station to reinstate a damsel.

They did not name the person.