popular narrative indeed! and coin to reward it, and applause.  But I am reminded that a story properly closed on the marriage of the heroine Constance and her young Minister of State, has no time for conjuring chemists’ bouquet of aristocracy to lure the native taste.  When we have satisfied English sentiment, our task is done, in every branch of art, I hear:  and it will account to posterity for the condition of the branches.  Those yet wakeful eccentrics interested in such a person as Diana, to the extent of remaining attentive till the curtain falls, demand of me to gather-up the threads concerning her:  which my gardener sweeping his pile of dead leaves before the storm and night, advises me to do speedily.  But it happens that her resemblance to her sex and species of a civilized period plants the main threads in her bosom.  Rogues and a policeman, or a hurried change of front of all the actors, are not a part of our slow machinery.

Nor is she to show herself to advantage.  Only those who read her woman’s blood and character with the head, will care for Diana of the Crossways now that the knot of her history has been unravelled.  Some little love they must have for her likewise:  and how it can be quickened on behalf of a woman who never sentimentalizes publicly, and has no dolly-dolly compliance, and muses on actual life, and fatigues with the exercise of brains, and is in sooth an alien:  a princess of her kind and time, but a foreign one, speaking a language distinct from the mercantile, trafficking in ideas:—­this is the problem.  For to be true to her, one cannot attempt at propitiation.  She said worse things of the world than that which was conveyed to the boxed ears of Mrs. Fryar-Gunnett.  Accepting the war declared against her a second time, she performed the common mental trick in adversity of setting her personally known innocence to lessen her generally unknown error—­but anticipating that this might become known, and the other not; and feeling that the motives of the acknowledged error had served to guard her from being the culprit of the charge she writhed under, she rushed out of a meditation compounded of mind and nerves, with derision of the world’s notion of innocence and estimate of error.  It was a mood lasting through her stay in London, and longer, to the discomfort of one among her friends; and it was worthy of The Anti-climax Expedition, as she called it.

For the rest, her demeanour to the old monster world exacting the servility of her, in repayment for its tolerating countenance, was faultless.  Emma beheld the introduction to Mrs. Warwick of his bride, by Mr. Percy Dacier.  She had watched their approach up the Ball-room, thinking, how differently would Redworth and Tony have looked.  Differently, had it been Tony and Dacier:  but Emma could not persuade herself of a possible harmony between them, save at the cost of Tony’s expiation of the sin of the greater heart in a performance equivalent to Suttee.