The wild brain of Diana, armed by her later enlightenment as to the laws of life and nature, dashed in revolt at the laws of the world when she thought of the forces, natural and social, urging young women to marry and be bound to the end.

It should be a spotless world which is thus ruthless.

But were the world impeccable it would behave more generously.

The world is ruthless, dear friends, because the world is hypocrite!  The world cannot afford to be magnanimous, or even just.

Her dissensions with her husband, their differences of opinion, and puny wranglings, hoistings of two standards, reconciliations for the sake of decency, breaches of the truce, and his detested meanness, the man behind the mask; and glimpses of herself too, the half-known, half-suspected, developing creature claiming to be Diana, and unlike her dreamed Diana, deformed by marriage, irritable, acerb, rebellious, constantly justifiable against him, but not in her own mind, and therefore accusing him of the double crime of provoking her and perverting her—­these were the troops defiling through her head while she did battle with the hypocrite world.

One painful sting was caused by the feeling that she could have loved—­whom?  An ideal.  Had he, the imagined but unvisioned, been her yoke-fellow, would she now lie raising caged-beast cries in execration of the yoke?  She would not now be seeing herself as hare, serpent, tigress!  The hypothesis was reviewed in negatives:  she had barely a sense of softness, just a single little heave of the bosom, quivering upward and leadenly sinking, when she glanced at a married Diana heartily mated.  The regrets of the youthful for a life sailing away under medical sentence of death in the sad eyes of relatives resemble it.  She could have loved.  Good-bye to that!

A woman’s brutallest tussle with the world was upon her.  She was in the arena of the savage claws, flung there by the man who of all others should have protected her from them.  And what had she done to deserve it?  She listened to the advocate pleading her case; she primed him to admit the charges, to say the worst, in contempt of legal prudence, and thereby expose her transparent honesty.  The very things awakening a mad suspicion proved her innocence.  But was she this utterly simple person?  Oh, no!  She was the Diana of the pride in her power of fencing with evil—­by no means of the order of those ninny young women who realize the popular conception of the purely innocent.  She had fenced and kept her guard.  Of this it was her angry glory to have the knowledge.  But she had been compelled to fence.  Such are men in the world of facts, that when a woman steps out of her domestic tangle to assert, because it is a tangle, her rights to partial independence, they sight her for their prey, or at least they complacently suppose her accessible.  Wretched at home, a woman ought to bury herself in her wretchedness, else may she be assured that not the cleverest, wariest guard will cover her character.