Better take the leap than be guilty of double-dealing even on paper!  The nature of the leap she did not examine.

Her keen apprehension of the price payable for his benevolent intentions caught scent of them in the air.  Those Ormont jewels shone as emblems of a detested subjection, the penalty for being the beautiful woman rageing men proclaimed.  Was there no scheme of some other sort, and far less agreeable, to make amends for Steignton?  She was shrewd at divination; she guessed her lord’s design.  Rather than meet Lady Charlotte, she proposed to herself the ‘leap’ immediately; knowing it must be a leap in the dark, hoping it might be into a swimmer’s water.  She had her own pin-money income, and she loathed the chain of her title.  So the leap would at least be honourable, as it assuredly would be unregretted, whatever ensued.

While Aminta’s heart held on to this debate, and in her bed, in her boat, across the golden valley meadows beside her peaceful little friend, she gathered a gradual resolution without sight of agencies or consequences, Lord Ormont was kept from her by the struggle to master his Charlotte a second time—­compared with which the first was insignificant.  And this time it was curious:  he could not subdue her physique, as he did before; she was ready for him each day, and she was animated, much more voluble, she was ready to jest.  The reason being, that she fought now on plausibly good grounds:  on behalf of her independent action.

Previously, her intelligence of the ultimate defeat hanging over the more stubborn defence of a weak position had harassed her to death’s door.  She had no right to retain the family jewels; she had the most perfect of established rights to refuse doing an ignominious thing.  She refused to visit the so-called Countess of Ormont, or leave her card, or take one step to warrant the woman in speaking of her as her sister-in-law.  And no,—­it did not signify that her brother Rowsley was prohibited by her from marrying whom he pleased.  It meant, that to judge of his acts as those of a reasoning man, he would have introduced his wife to his relatives—­the relatives he had not quarrelled with—­immediately upon his marriage unless he was ashamed of the woman; and a wife he was ashamed of was no sister-in-law for her nor aunt for her daughters.  Nor should she come playing the Black Venus among her daughters’ husbands, Lady Charlotte had it in her bosom to say additionally.

Lord Ormont was disconcerted by her manifest pleasure in receiving him every day.  Evidently she consented to the recurrence of a vexatious dissension for the enjoyment of having him with her hourly.  Her dialectic, too, was cunning.  Impetuous with meaning, she forced her way to get her meaning out, in a manner effective to strike her blow.  Anything for a diversion or a triumph of the moment!  He made no way.  She was the better fencer at the tongue.