‘I have, with my whole soul,’ said Emma.

So the confession closed; and in the present instance there were not any forgotten chambers to be unlocked and ransacked for addenda confessions.

The subjects discoursed of by the two endeared the hours to them.  They were aware that the English of the period would have laughed a couple of women to scorn for venturing on them, and they were not a little hostile in consequence, and shot their epigrams profusely, applauding the keener that appeared to score the giant bulk of their intolerant enemy, who holds the day, but not the morrow.  Us too he holds for the day, to punish us if we have temporal cravings.  He scatters his gifts to the abject; tossing to us rebels bare dog-biscuit.  But the life of the spirit is beyond his region; we have our morrow in his day when we crave nought of him.  Diana and Emma delighted to discover that they were each the rebel of their earlier and less experienced years; each a member of the malcontent minor faction, the salt of earth, to whom their salt must serve for nourishment, as they admitted, relishing it determinedly, not without gratification.

Sir Lukin was busy upon his estate in Scotland.  They summoned young Arthur Rhodes to the island, that he might have a taste of the new scenes.  Diana was always wishing for his instruction and refreshment; and Redworth came to spend a Saturday and Sunday with them, and showed his disgust of the idle boy, as usual, at the same time consulting them on the topic of furniture for the Berkshire mansion he had recently bought, rather vaunting the Spanish pictures his commissioner in Madrid was transmitting.  The pair of rebels, vexed by his treatment of the respectful junior, took him for an incarnation of their enemy, and pecked and worried the man astonishingly.  He submitted to it like the placable giant.  Yes, he was a Liberal, and furnishing and decorating the house in the stability of which he trusted.  Why not?  We must accept the world as it is, try to improve it by degrees.—­Not so:  humanity will not wait for you, the victims are shrieking beneath the bricks of your enormous edifice, behind the canvas of your pictures.  ’But you may really say that luxurious yachting is an odd kind of insurgency,’ avowed Diana.  ’It’s the tangle we are in.’

’It’s the coat we have to wear; and why fret at it for being comfortable?’

‘I don’t half enough, when I think of my shivering neighbours.’

‘Money is of course a rough test of virtue,’ said Redworth.  ’We have no other general test.’

Money!  The ladies proclaimed it a mere material test; Diana, gazing on sunny sea, with an especial disdain.  And name us your sort of virtue.  There is more virtue in poverty, He denied that.  Inflexibly British, he declared money, and also the art of getting money, to be hereditary virtues, deserving of their reward.  The reward a superior wealth and its fruits?  Yes, the power to enjoy and spread