‘I meant no harm in coming,’ she said, at the shaking of hands.

‘No, no; I understand,’ said her hostess:  ’you are hen-hearted over your adopted brood.  The situation is perceptible and your intention creditable.’

As one of the good women of the world, Lady Wathin in departing was indignant at the tone and dialect of a younger woman not modestly concealing her possession of the larger brain.  Brains in women she both dreaded and detested; she believed them to be devilish.  Here were instances:—­they had driven poor Sir Lukin to evil courses, and that poor Mr. Warwick straight under the wheels of a cab.  Sir Lukin’s name was trotting in public with a naughty Mrs. Fryar-Gunnett’s:  Mrs. Warwick might still trim her arts to baffle the marriage.  Women with brains, moreover, are all heartless:  they have no pity for distress, no horror of catastrophes, no joy in the happiness of the deserving.  Brains in men advance a household to station; but brains in women divide it and are the wrecking of society.  Fortunately Lady Wathin knew she could rally a powerful moral contingent, the aptitude of which for a one-minded cohesion enabled it to crush those fractional daughters of mischief.  She was a really good woman of the world, heading a multitude; the same whom you are accustomed to hear exalted; lucky in having had a guided girlhood, a thick-curtained prudence; and in having stock in the moral funds, shares in the sentimental tramways.  Wherever the world laid its hoards or ran its lines, she was found, and forcible enough to be eminent; though at fixed hours of the day, even as she washed her hands, she abjured worldliness:  a performance that cleansed her.  If she did not make morality appear loveable to the objects of her dislike, it was owing to her want of brains to see the origin, nature and right ends of morality.  But a world yet more deficient than she, esteemed her cordially for being a bulwark of the present edifice; which looks a solid structure when the microscope is not applied to its components.

Supposing Percy Dacier a dishonourable tattler as well as an icy lover, and that Lady Wathin, through his bride, had become privy to the secret between him and Diana?  There is reason to think that she would have held it in terror over the baneful woman, but not have persecuted her:  for she was by no means the active malignant of theatrical plots.  No, she would have charged it upon the possession of brains by women, and have had a further motive for inciting the potent dignitary her husband to employ his authority to repress the sex’s exercise of those fell weapons, hurtful alike to them and all coming near them.

So extreme was her dread of Mrs. Warwick, that she drove from the London railway station to see Constance and be reassured by her tranquil aspect.

Sweet Constance and her betrothed Percy were together, examining a missal.