ages of the wedded pair accounts poorly for the husband’s conduct, however solemn a business the game of whist.  We read that he burst out at last, with bitter mimicry, ‘yang—­yang—­yang!’ and killed the bright laugh, shot it dead.  She had outraged the decorum of the square-table only while the cards were making.  Perhaps her too-dead ensuing silence, as of one striving to bring back the throbs to a slain bird in her bosom, allowed the gap between the wedded pair to be visible, for it was dated back to prophecy as soon as the trumpet proclaimed it.

But a multiplication of similar instances, which can serve no other purpose than that of an apology, is a miserable vindication of innocence.  The more we have of them the darker the inference.  In delicate situations the chatterer is noxious.  Mrs. Warwick had numerous apologists.  Those trusting to her perfect rectitude were rarer.  The liberty she allowed herself in speech and action must have been trying to her defenders in a land like ours; for here, and able to throw its shadow on our giddy upper-circle, the rigour of the game of life, relaxed though it may sometimes appear, would satisfy the staidest whist-player.  She did not wish it the reverse, even when claiming a space for laughter:  ’the breath of her soul,’ as she called it, and as it may be felt in the early youth of a lively nature.  She, especially, with her multitude of quick perceptions and imaginative avenues, her rapid summaries, her sense of the comic, demanded this aerial freedom.

We have it from Perry Wilkinson that the union of the divergent couple was likened to another union always in a Court of Law.  There was a distinction; most analogies will furnish one; and here we see England and Ireland changeing their parts, until later, after the breach, when the Englishman and Irishwoman resumed a certain resemblance to the yoked Islands.

Henry Wilmers, I have said, deals exclusively with the wit and charm of the woman.  He treats the scandal as we might do in like manner if her story had not to be told.  But these are not reporting columns; very little of it shall trouble them.  The position is faced, and that is all.  The position is one of the battles incident to women, their hardest.  It asks for more than justice from men, for generosity, our civilization not being yet of the purest.  That cry of hounds at her disrobing by Law is instinctive.  She runs, and they give tongue; she is a creature of the chase.  Let her escape unmangled, it will pass in the record that she did once publicly run, and some old dogs will persist in thinking her cunninger than the virtuous, which never put themselves in such positions, but ply the distaff at home.  Never should reputation of woman trail a scent!  How true! and true also that the women of waxwork never do; and that the women of happy marriages do not; nor the women of holy nunneries; nor the women lucky in their arts.  It is a test of the civilized to see and hear, and add no yapping to the spectacle.