which the world accepts for the very bottom truth if their dredge brings up sheer refuse of the abominable.  The world imagines those to be at our nature’s depths who are impudent enough to expose its muddy shallows.  She was in the mood for such a kind of writing:  she could have started on it at once but that the theme was wanting; and it may count on popularity, a great repute for penetration.  It is true of its kind, though the dredging of nature is the miry form of art.  When it flourishes we may be assured we have been overenamelling the higher forms.  She felt, and shuddered to feel, that she could draw from dark stores.  Hitherto in her works it had been a triumph of the good.  They revealed a gaping deficiency of the subtle insight she now possessed.  ’Exhibit humanity as it is, wallowing, sensual, wicked, behind the mask,’ a voice called to her; she was allured by the contemplation of the wide-mouthed old dragon Ego, whose portrait, decently painted, establishes an instant touch of exchange between author and public, the latter detected and confessing.  Next to the pantomime of Humour and Pathos, a cynical surgical knife at the human bosom seems the surest talisman for this agreeable exchange; and she could cut.  She gave herself a taste of her powers.  She cut at herself mercilessly, and had to bandage the wound in a hurry to keep in life.

Metaphors were her refuge.  Metaphorically she could allow her mind to distinguish the struggle she was undergoing, sinking under it.  The banished of Eden had to put on metaphors, and the common use of them has helped largely to civilize us.  The sluggish in intellect detest them, but our civilization is not much indebted to that major faction.  Especially are they needed by the pedestalled woman in her conflict with the natural.  Diana saw herself through the haze she conjured up.  ’Am I worse than other women?’ was a piercing twithought.  Worse, would be hideous isolation.  The not worse, abased her sex.  She could afford to say that the world was bad:  not that women were.

Sinking deeper, an anguish of humiliation smote her to a sense of drowning.  For what of the poetic ecstasy on her Salvatore heights had not been of origin divine? had sprung from other than spiritual founts? had sprung from the reddened sources she was compelled to conceal?  Could it be?  She would not believe it.  But there was matter to clip her wings, quench her light, in the doubt.

She fell asleep like the wrecked flung ashore.

Danvers entered her room at an early hour for London to inform her that
Mr. Percy Dacier was below, and begged permission to wait.

Diana gave orders for breakfast to be proposed to him.  She lay staring at the wall until it became too visibly a reflection of her mind.

CHAPTER XXV

ONCE MORE THE CROSSWAYS AND A CHANGE OF TURNINGS

The suspicion of his having come to impart the news of his proximate marriage ultimately endowed her with sovereign calmness.  She had need to think it, and she did.  Tea was brought to her while she dressed; she descended the stairs revolving phrases of happy congratulation and the world’s ordinary epigrams upon the marriage-tie, neatly mixed.