‘She would have gone under, but for you, dear Tony!’ said Emma’ folding arms round her darling’s neck anal kissing her.  ’Bring her here some day.’

Diana did not promise it.  She had her vision of Sir Lukin in his fit of lunacy.

‘I am too weak for London now,’ Emma resumed.  ’I should like to be useful.  Is she pleasant?’

‘Sprightly by nature.  She has worn herself with fretting.’

’Then bring her to stay with me, if I cannot keep you.  She will talk of you to me.’

‘I will bring her for a couple of days,’ Diana said.  ’I am too busy to remain longer.  She paints portraits to amuse herself.  She ought to be pushed, wherever she is received about London, while the season is warm.  One season will suffice to establish her.  She is pretty, near upon six and twenty:  foolish, of course:—­she pays for having had a romantic head.  Heavy payment, Emmy!  I drive at laws, but hers is an instance of the creatures wanting simple human kindness.’

’The good law will come with a better civilization; but before society can be civilized it has to be debarbarized,’ Emma remarked, and Diana sighed over the task and the truism.

I should have said in younger days, because it will not look plainly on our nature and try to reconcile it with our conditions.  But now I see that the sin is cowardice.  The more I know of the world the more clearly I perceive that its top and bottom sin is cowardice, physically and morally alike.  Lord Larrian owns to there being few heroes in an army.  We must fawn in society.  What is the meaning of that dread of one example of tolerance?  O my dear! let us give it the right name.  Society is the best thing we have, but it is a crazy vessel worked by a crew that formerly practised piracy, and now, in expiation, professes piety, fearful of a discovered Omnipotence, which is in the image of themselves and captain.  Their old habits are not quite abandoned, and their new one is used as a lash to whip the exposed of us for a propitiation of the capricious potentate whom they worship in the place of the true God.’

Lady Dunstane sniffed.  ‘I smell the leading article.’

Diana joined with her smile, ‘No, the style is rather different.’

‘Have you not got into a trick of composing in speaking, at times?’

Diana confessed, ’I think I have at times.  Perhaps the daily writing of all kinds and the nightly talking . . .  I may be getting strained.’

’No, Tony; but longer visits in the country to me would refresh you.  I miss your lighter touches.  London is a school, but, you know it, not a school for comedy nor for philosophy; that is gathered on my hills, with London distantly in view, and then occasional descents on it well digested.’

‘I wonder whether it is affecting me!’ said Diana, musing.  ’A metropolitan hack! and while thinking myself free, thrice harnessed; and all my fun gone.  Am I really as dull as a tract, my dear?  I must be, or I should be proving the contrary instead of asking.  My pitfall is to fancy I have powers equal to the first look-out of the eyes of the morning.  Enough of me.  We talked of Mary Paynham.  If only some right good man would marry her!’