‘Oh! stale as peel of fruit long since consumed,’ she chimed.

And go they proceeded; and they laughed, Emma smiled a little, Redworth did the same beneath one of his questioning frowns—­a sort of fatherly grimace.

A suspicion that this man, when infatuated, was able to practise the absurdest benevolence, the burlesque of chivalry, as a man-admiring sex esteems it, stirred very naughty depths of the woman in Diana, labouring under her perverted mood.  She put him to proof, for the chance of arming her wickedest to despise him.  Arthur was petted, consulted, cited, flattered all round; all but caressed.  She played, with a reserve, the maturish young woman smitten by an adorable youth; and enjoyed doing it because she hoped for a visible effect—­more paternal benevolence—­and could do it so dispassionately.  Coquettry, Emma thought, was most unworthily shown; and it was of the worst description.  Innocent of conspiracy, she had seen the array of Tony’s lost household treasures she wondered at a heartlessness that would not even utter common thanks to the friendly man for the compliment of prizing her portrait and the things she had owned; and there seemed an effort to wound him.

The invalided woman, charitable with allowances for her erratic husband, could offer none for the woman of a long widowhood, that had become a trebly sensitive maidenhood; abashed by her knowledge of the world, animated by her abounding blood; cherishing her new freedom, dreading the menacer; feeling that though she held the citadel, she was daily less sure of its foundations, and that her hope of some last romance in life was going; for in him shone not a glimpse.  He appeared to Diana as a fatal power, attracting her without sympathy, benevolently overcoming:  one of those good men, strong men, who subdue and do not kindle.  The enthralment revolted a nature capable of accepting subjection only by burning.  In return for his moral excellence, she gave him the moral sentiments:  esteem, gratitude, abstract admiration, perfect faith.  But the man?  She could not now say she had never been loved; and a flood of tenderness rose in her bosom, swelling from springs that she had previously reproved with a desperate severity:  the unhappy, unsatisfied yearning to be more than loved, to love.  It was alive, out of the wreck of its first trial.  This, the secret of her natural frailty, was bitter to her pride:  chastely-minded as she was, it whelmed her.  And then her comic imagination pictured Redworth dramatically making love.  And to a widow!  It proved him to be senseless of romance.  Poetic men take aim at maidens.  His devotedness to a widow was charged against him by the widow’s shudder at antecedents distasteful to her soul, a discolouration of her life.  She wished to look entirely forward, as upon a world washed clear of night, not to be cast back on her antecedents by practical wooings or words of love; to live spiritually; free of the shower at her eyelids attendant on any idea of her loving.  The woman who talked of the sentimentalist’s ‘fiddling harmonics,’ herself stressed the material chords, in her attempt to escape out of herself and away from her pursuer.