Observing the quick change in Tony’s eyes, Emma exclaimed:  ’How you looked disdain when you asked whether he had told me!  But why are you the handsome tigress to him, of all men living!  The dear fellow, dear to me at least! since the day he first saw you, has worshipped you and striven to serve you:—­and harder than any Scriptural service to have the beloved woman to wife.  I know nothing to compare with it, for he is a man of warmth.  He is one of those rare men of honour who can command their passion; who venerate when they love:  and those are the men that women select for punishment!  Yes, you!  It is to the woman he loves that he cannot show himself as he is, because he is at her feet.  You have managed to stamp your spirit on him; and as a consequence, he defends you now, for flinging him off.  And now his chief regret is, that he has caused his name to be coupled with yours.  I suppose he had some poor hope, seeing you free.  Or else the impulse to protect the woman of his heart and soul was too strong.  I have seen what he suffered, years back, at the news of your engagement.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake, don’t,’ cried Tony, tears running over, and her dream of freedom, her visions of romance, drowning.

’It was like the snapping of the branch of an oak, when the trunk stands firm,’ Emma resumed, in her desire to scourge as well as to soften.  ’But similes applied to him will strike you as incongruous.’  Tony swayed her body, for a negative, very girlishly and consciously.  ’He probably did not woo you in a poetic style, or the courtly by prescription.’  Again Tony swayed; she had to hug herself under the stripes, and felt as if alone at sea, with her dear heavens pelting.  ’You have sneered at him for his calculating—­to his face:  and it was when he was comparatively poor that he calculated—­to his cost! that he dared not ask you to marry a man who could not offer you a tithe of what he considered fit for the peerless woman.  Peerless, I admit.  There he was not wrong.  But if he had valued you half a grain less, he might have won you.  You talk much of chivalry; you conceive a superhuman ideal, to which you fit a very indifferent wooden model, while the man of all the world the most chivalrous! . . .  He is a man quite other from what you think him:  anything but a “Cuthbert Dering” or a “Man of Two Minds.”  He was in the drawing-room below, on the day I received your last maiden letter from The Crossways—­now his property, in the hope of making it yours.’

‘I behaved abominably there!’ interposed Tony, with a gasp.

’Let it pass.  At any rate, that was the prick of a needle, not the blow of a sword.’

‘But marriage, dear Emmy! marriage!  Is marriage to be the end of me?’

’What amazing apotheosis have you in prospect?  And are you steering so particularly well by yourself?’

’Miserably!  But I can dream.  And the thought of a husband cuts me from any dreaming.  It’s all dead flat earth at once!’