Diana’s battle was fought shadowily behind her for the space of a week or so, with some advocates on behalf of the beaten man; then it became a recollection of a beautiful woman, possibly erring, misvalued by a husband, who was neither a man of the world nor a gracious yokefellow, nor anything to match her.  She, however, once out of the public flames, had to recall her scorchings to be gentle with herself.  Under a defeat, she would have been angrily self-vindicated.  The victory of the ashen laurels drove her mind inward to gird at the hateful yoke, in compassion for its pair of victims.  Quite earnestly by such means, yet always bearing a comical eye on her subterfuges, she escaped the extremes of personal blame.  Those advocates of her opponent in and out of court compelled her honest heart to search within and own to faults.  But were they not natural faults?  It was her marriage; it was marriage in the abstract:  her own mistake and the world’s clumsy machinery of civilization:  these were the capital offenders:  not the wife who would laugh ringingly, and would have friends of the other sex, and shot her epigrams at the helpless despot, and was at times—­yes, vixenish; a nature driven to it, but that was the word.  She was too generous to recount her charges against the vanquished.  If his wretched jealousy had ruined her, the secret high tribunal within her bosom, which judged her guiltless for putting the sword between their marriage tie when they stood as one, because a quarrelling couple could not in honour play the embracing, pronounced him just pardonable.  She distinguished that he could only suppose, manlikely, one bad cause for the division.

To this extent she used her unerring brains, more openly than on her night of debate at The Crossways.  The next moment she was off in vapour, meditating grandly on her independence of her sex and the passions.  Love! she did not know it, she was not acquainted with either the criminal or the domestic God, and persuaded herself that she never could be.  She was a Diana of coldness, preferring friendship; she could be the friend of men.  There was another who could be the friend of women.  Her heart leapt to Redworth.  Conjuring up his clear trusty face, at their grasp of hands when parting, she thought of her visions of her future about the period of the Dublin Ball, and acknowledged, despite the erratic step to wedlock, a gain in having met and proved so true a friend.  His face, figure, character, lightest look, lightest word, all were loyal signs of a man of honour, cold as she; he was the man to whom she could have opened her heart for inspection.  Rejoicing in her independence of an emotional sex, the impulsive woman burned with a regret that at their parting she had not broken down conventional barriers and given her cheek to his lips in the antiinsular fashion with a brotherly friend.  And why not when both were cold?  Spirit to spirit, she did, delightfully refreshed by her capacity to do so without a throb.