Being a stranger to the jealousy of men, he took the soft assurance that he was preferred above them all.  Competitors were numerous:  not any won her eyes as he did.  She revealed nothing of the same pleasures in the shining of the others touched by her magical wand.  Would she have pardoned one of them the ‘Diana!’ bursting from his mouth?

She was not a woman for trifling, still less for secresy.  He was as little the kind of lover.  Both would be ready to take up their burden, if the burden was laid on them.  Diana had thus far impressed him.

Meanwhile he faced the cathedral towers of the ancient Norman city, standing up in the smoky hues of the West; and a sentence out of her book seemed fitting to the scene and what he felt.  He rolled it over luxuriously as the next of delights to having her beside him.—­She wrote of; ’Thoughts that are bare dark outlines, coloured by some odd passion of the soul, like towers of a distant city seen in the funeral waste of day.’—­His bluff English anti-poetic training would have caused him to shrug at the stuff coming from another pen:  he might condescendingly have criticized it, with a sneer embalmed in humour.  The words were hers; she had written them; almost by a sort of anticipation, he imagined; for he at once fell into the mood they suggested, and had a full crop of the ‘bare dark outlines’ of thoughts coloured by his particular form of passion.

Diana had impressed him powerfully when she set him swallowing and assimilating a sentence ethereally thin in substance of mere sentimental significance, that he would antecedently have read aloud in a drawing-room, picking up the book by hazard, as your modern specimen of romantic vapouring.  Mr. Dacier however was at the time in observation of the towers of Caen, fresh from her presence, animated to some conception of her spirit.  He drove into the streets, desiring, half determining, to risk a drive back on the morrow.

The cold light of the morrow combined with his fear of distressing her to restrain him.  Perhaps he thought it well not to risk his gains.  He was a northerner in blood.  He may have thought it well not further to run the personal risk immediately.

CHAPTER XXIII

RECORDS A VISIT TO DIANA FROM ONE OF THE WORLD’S GOOD WOMEN

Pure disengagement of contemplativeness had selected.  Percy Dacier as the model of her young minister of state, Diana supposed.  Could she otherwise have dared to sketch him?  She certainly would not have done it now.

That was a reflection similar to what is entertained by one who has dropped from a precipice to the midway ledge over the abyss, where caution of the whole sensitive being is required for simple self-preservation.  How could she have been induced to study and portray him!  It seemed a form of dementia.