the rest are wind.  Which signifies, that if you do not take his estimate of himself, you will think little of his:  negative virtues.  He is not eminently, that is to say, not saliently, selfish; not rancorous, not obtrusive—­tata-ta-ta.  But dull!—­dull as a woollen nightcap over eyes and ears and mouth.  Oh! an executioner’s black cap to me.  Dull, and suddenly staring awake to the idea of his honour.  I “rendered” him ridiculous—­I had caught a trick of “using men’s phrases.”  Dearest, now that the day of trial draws nigh—­you have never questioned me, and it was like you to spare me pain—­but now I can speak of him and myself.’  Diana dropped her voice.  Here was another confession.  The proximity of the trial acted like fire on her faded recollection of incidents.  It may be that partly the shame of alluding to them had blocked her woman’s memory.  For one curious operation of the charge of guiltiness upon the nearly guiltless is to make them paint themselves pure white, to the obliteration of minor spots, until the whiteness being acknowledged, or the ordeal imminent, the spots recur and press upon their consciences.  She resumed, in a rapid undertone:  ’You know that a certain degree of independence had been, if not granted by him, conquered by me.  I had the habit of it.  Obedience with him is imprisonment—­he is a blind wall.  He received a commission, greatly to his advantage, and was absent.  He seems to have received information of some sort.  He returned unexpectedly, at a late hour, and attacked me at once, middling violent.  My friend—­and that he is! was coming from the House for a ten minutes’ talk, as usual, on his way home, to refresh him after the long sitting and bear-baiting he had nightly to endure.  Now let me confess:  I grew frightened; Mr. Warwick was “off his head,” as they say-crazy, and I could not bear the thought of those two meeting.  While he raged I threw open the window and put the lamp near it, to expose the whole interior—­cunning as a veteran intriguer:  horrible, but it had to be done to keep them apart.  He asked me what madness possessed me, to sit by an open window at midnight, in view of the public, with a damp wind blowing.  I complained of want of air and fanned my forehead.  I heard the steps on the pavement; I stung him to retort loudly, and I was relieved; the steps passed on.  So the trick succeeded—­the trick!  It was the worst I was guilty of, but it was a trick, and it branded me trickster.  It teaches me to see myself with an abyss in my nature full of infernal possibilities.  I think I am hewn in black rock.  A woman who can do as I did by instinct, needs to have an angel always near her, if she has not a husband she reveres.’