The long-suffering Fates permitted her for a term to enjoy the generous delusion.  Subsequently a sweet surprise alleviated the shock she had sustained.  Emma Dunstane’s carriage was at her door, and Emma entered her sitting-room, to tell her of having hired a house in the neighbourhood, looking on the park.  She begged to have her for guest, sorrowfully anticipating the refusal.  At least they were to be near one another.

‘You really like this life in lodgings?’ asked Emma, to whom the stiff furniture and narrow apartments were a dreariness, the miserably small fire of the sitting-room an aspect of cheerless winter.

‘I do,’ said Diana; ‘yes,’ she added with some reserve, and smiled at her damped enthusiasm, ’I can eat when I like, walk, work—­and I am working!  My legs and my pen demand it.  Let me be independent!  Besides, I begin to learn something of the bigger world outside the one I know, and I crush my mincing tastes.  In return for that, I get a sense of strength I had not when I was a drawing-room exotic.  Much is repulsive.  But I am taken with a passion for reality.’

They spoke of the lawyers, and the calculated period of the trial; of the husband too, in his inciting belief in the falseness of his wife.  ’That is his excuse,’ Diana said, her closed mouth meditatively dimpling the comers over thoughts of his grounds for fury.  He had them, though none for the incriminating charge.  The Sphinx mouth of the married woman at war and at bay must be left unriddled.  She and the law differed in their interpretation of the dues of wedlock.

But matters referring to her case were secondary with Diana beside the importance of her storing impressions.  Her mind required to hunger for something, and this Reality which frequently she was forced to loathe, she forced herself proudly to accept, despite her youthfulness.  Her philosophy swallowed it in the lump, as the great serpent his meal; she hoped to digest it sleeping likewise.  Her visits of curiosity to the Law Courts, where she stood spying and listening behind a veil, gave her a great deal of tough substance to digest.  There she watched the process of the tortures to be applied to herself, and hardened her senses for the ordeal.  She saw there the ribbed and shanked old skeleton world on which our fair fleshly is moulded.  After all, your Fool’s Paradise is not a garden to grow in.  Charon’s ferry-boat is not thicker with phantoms.  They do not live in mind or soul.  Chiefly women people it:  a certain class of limp men; women for the most part:  they are sown there.  And put their garden under the magnifying glass of intimacy, what do we behold?  A world not better than the world it curtains, only foolisher.

Her conversations with Lady Dunstane brought her at last to the point of her damped enthusiasm.  She related an incident or two occurring in her career of independence, and they discussed our state of civilization plainly and gravely, save for the laughing peals her phrases occasionally provoked; as when she named the intruders and disturbers of solitarily-faring ladies, ‘Cupid’s footpads.’  Her humour was created to swim on waters where a prescribed and cultivated prudery should pretend to be drowning.