Then, and day by day more strongly, she felt for her name.  She put a false heart into it.  She called herself to her hearing the Countess of Ormont, and deigned to consult the most foolish friend she could have chosen—­her aunt; and even listened to her advice, that she should run about knocking at all the doors open to her, and state her case against the earl.  It seemed the course to take, the moment for taking it.  Was she not asked if she could now at last show she had pride?  Her pride ran stinging through her veins, like a band of freed prisoners who head the rout to fire a city.  She charged her lord with having designedly—­oh! cunningly indeed left her to be the prey of her enemies at the hour when he knew it behoved him to be her great defender.  There had been no disguise of the things in progress:  they had been spoken of allusively, quite comprehensibly, after the fashion common with two entertaining a secret semi-hostility on a particular subject; one of them being the creature that blushes and is educated to be delicate, reserved, and timorous.  He was not ignorant, and he had left her, and he would not reply to her letter!

So fell was her mood, that an endeavour to conjure up the scene of her sitting beside the death-bed of Matthew Weyburn’s mother, failed to sober and smooth it, holy though that time was.  The false heart she had put into the pride of her name was powerfuller than the heart in her bosom.  But to what end had the true heart counselled her of late?  It had been a home of humours and languors, an impotent insurgent, the sapper of her character; and as we see in certain disorderly States a curative incendiarism usurp the functions of the sluggish citizen, and the work of re-establishment done by destruction, in peril of a total extinction, Aminta’s feverish anger on behalf of her name went a stretch to vivify and give her dulled character a novel edge.  She said good-bye to cowardice.  ‘I have no husband to defend me—­I must do it for myself.’  The peril of a too complete exercise of independence was just intimated to her perceptions.  On whom the blame?  And let the motively guilty go mourn over consequences!  That Institution of Marriage was eyed.  Is it not a halting step to happiness?  It is the step of a cripple,—­and one leg or the other poses for the feebler sex,—­small is the matter which!  And is happiness our cry?  Our cry is rather for circumstance and occasion to use our functions, and the conditions are denied to women by Marriage—­denied to the luckless of women, who are many, very many:  denied to Aminta, calling herself Countess of Ormont, for one, denied to Mrs. Lawrence Finchley for another, and in a base bad manner.  She had defended her good name triumphantly, only to enslave herself for life or snatch at the liberty which besmirches.