of the world.  Her direct individuality rejected the performance of simpleton, and her lively blood, the warmer for its containment quickened her to penetrate things and natures; and if as yet, in justness to the loyal male friend, she forbore to name him conspirator, she read both him and Emma, whose inner bosom was revealed to her, without an effort to see.  But her characteristic chasteness of mind, not coldness of the ’blood,—­which had supported an arduous conflict, past all existing rights closely to depict, and which barbed her to pierce to the wishes threatening her freedom, deceived her now to think her flaming blushes came of her relentless divination on behalf of her recovered treasure:  whereby the clear reading of others distracted the view of herself.  For one may be the cleverest alive, and still hoodwinked while blood is young and warm.

The perpetuity of the contrast presented to her reflections, of Redworth’s healthy, open, practical, cheering life, and her own freakishly interwinding, darkly penetrative, simulacrum of a life, cheerless as well as useless, forced her humiliated consciousness by degrees, in spite of pride, to the knowledge that she was engaged in a struggle with him; and that he was the stronger;—­it might be, the worthier:  she thought him the handsomer.  He throve to the light of day, and she spun a silly web that meshed her in her intricacies.  Her intuition of Emma’s wishes led to this; he was constantly before her.  She tried to laugh at the image of the concrete cricketer, half-flannelled, and red of face:  the ‘lucky calculator,’ as she named him to Emma, who shook her head, and sighed.  The abstract, healthful and powerful man, able to play besides profitably working, defied those poor efforts.  Consequently, at once she sent up a bubble to the skies, where it became a spheral realm, of far too fine an atmosphere for men to breathe in it; and thither she transported herself at will, whenever the contrast, with its accompanying menace of a tyrannic subjugation, overshadowed her.  In the above, the kingdom composed of her shattered romance of life and her present aspirings, she was free and safe.  Nothing touched her there—­nothing that Redworth did.  She could not have admitted there her ideal of a hero.  It was the sublimation of a virgin’s conception of life, better fortified against the enemy.  She peopled it with souls of the great and pure, gave it illimitable horizons, dreamy nooks, ravishing landscapes, melodies of the poets of music.  Higher and more-celestial than the Salvatore, it was likewise, now she could assure herself serenely, independent of the horrid blood-emotions.  Living up there, she had not a feeling.

The natural result of this habit of ascending to a superlunary home, was the loss of an exact sense of how she was behaving below.  At the Berkshire mansion, she wore a supercilious air, almost as icy as she accused the place of being.  Emma knew she must have seen in the library a row of her literary ventures, exquisitely bound; but there was no allusion to the books.  Mary Paynham’s portrait of Mrs. Warwick hung staring over the fireplace, and was criticized, as though its occupancy of that position had no significance.