My lord had one of his wilful likings for Isabella Lawrence Finchley, and he consented to the torture of an hour of Mrs. Nargett Pagnell in the middle of the day, just to taste the favourite he welcomed at home as he championed her abroad.  The reasons were numerous and intimate why she pleased him.  He liked the woman, enjoyed the cause for battle that she gave.  Weyburn, on coming to the luncheon table, beheld a lady with the head of a comely boy, the manner, softened in delicate feminine, of a capital comrade.  Her air of candour was her nature in her face; and it carried a guileless roguery, a placid daring, a supersensual naughtiness, a simplicity of repose amid the smoky reputation she created, that led one to think the vapour calumnious or the creature privileged.  That young boy’s look opened him at once; he had not to warm to her,—­he flew.  Ordinarily the sweetest ladies will make us pass through cold mist and cross a stile or two, or a broken bridge, before the formalities are cleared away to grant us rights of citizenship.  She was like those frank lands where we have not to hand out a passport at the frontier and wait for dubious inspection of it.

She prevailed with cognizant men and with the frivolous.  Women were capable of appreciating her, too:  as Aminta did, despite some hinted qualifications addressed shyly to her husband.  But these were the very matters exciting his particular esteem.  He was of Lady Charlotte’s mind, in her hot zeal against injustice done to the creatures she despised; and yet more than she applauded a woman who took up her idiot husband’s challenge to defend her good name, and cleared it, right or wrong, and beat him down on his knees, and then started for her spell of the merry canter over turf:  an example to the English of the punishment they get for their stupid Puritanic tyranny—­sure to be followed by a national helter-skelter down-hill headlong.  And Mrs. Lawrence was not one of the corrupt, he argued; she concealed what it was decent to conceal, without pouting hypocritical pretences; she had merely dispensed with idle legal formalities, in the prettiest curvetting airy wanton way, to divorce the man who tried to divorce her, and ’whined to be forgiven when he found he couldn’t.  Adderwood was ready to marry her to-morrow, if the donkey husband would but go and bray his last.  Half a dozen others were heads off on the same course to that goal.’

That was her champion’s perusal of a lady candidly asserting her right to have breeched comrades, and paying for it in the advocacy which compromises.  She was taken to be and she was used as a weapon wherewith to strike at our Pharisees.  Women pushing out into the world for independence, bleed heavy payments all round.