and yet it reached to her heart.  She imagined a Providence that was trying her on the threshold, striking at her feebleness.  She had to lock herself in her room for an hour of deadly abandonment to misery, resembling the run of poison through her blood, before she could bear to lift eyes on her friend; to whom subsequently she said:  ’Emmy, there are wounds that cut sharp as the enchanter’s sword, and we don’t know we are in halves till some rough old intimate claps us on the back, merely to ask us how we are!  I have to join myself together again, as well as I can.  It’s done, dear; but don’t notice the cement.’

‘You will be brave,’ Emma petitioned.

‘I long to show you I will.’

The meeting with those who could guess a portion of her story, did not disconcert her.  To Lady Pennon and Lady Singleby, she was the brilliant Diana of her nominal luminary issuing from cloud.  Face and tongue, she was the same; and once in the stream, she soon gathered its current topics and scattered her arrowy phrases.  Lady Pennon ran about with them, declaring that the beautiful speaker, if ever down, was up, and up to her finest mark.  Mrs. Fryar-Gannett had then become the blazing regnant antisocial star; a distresser of domesticity, the magnetic attraction in the spirituous flames of that wild snapdragon bowl, called the Upper class; and she was angelically blonde, a straw-coloured Beauty.  ’A lovely wheat sheaf, if the head were ripe,’ Diana said of her.

‘Threshed, says her fame, my dear,’ Lady Pennon replied, otherwise allusive.

‘A wheatsheaf of contention for the bread of wind,’ said Diana, thinking of foolish Sir Lukin; thoughtless of talking to a gossip.

She would have shot a lighter dart, had she meant it to fly and fix.

Proclaim, ye classics, what minor Goddess, or primal, Iris or Ate, sped straight away on wing to the empty wheatsheaf-ears of the golden-visaged Amabel Fryar-Gunnett, daughter of Demeter in the field to behold, of Aphrodite in her rosy incendiarism for the many of men; filling that pearly concave with a perversion of the uttered speech, such as never lady could have repeated, nor man, if less than a reaping harvester:  which verily for women to hear, is to stamp a substantial damnatory verification upon the delivery of the saying:—­

’Mrs. Warwick says of you, that you’re a bundle of straws for everybody and bread for nobody.’

Or, stranger speculation, through what, and what number of conduits, curious, and variously colouring, did it reach the fair Amabel of the infant-in-cradle smile, in that deformation of the original utterance!  To pursue the thing, would be to enter the subter-sensual perfumed caverns of a Romance of Fashionable Life, with no hope of coming back to light, other than by tail of lynx, like the great Arabian seaman, at the last page of the final chapter.  A prospectively popular narrative indeed! and coin to reward it, and