Now, as Sir John Addington stood up to continue his speech on Mrs. Clarke’s behalf, begun on the previous day, Mrs. Chetwinde leaned forward and fixed her eyes upon him, closing her fingers tightly on the fan she had brought with her.

Sir John spoke with an earnestness and conviction which at certain moments rose almost to passion, as he drew the portrait of a woman whose brilliant mind and innocent nature had led her into the unconventional conduct which her enemies now asserted were wickedness.  Beadon Clarke’s counsel had suggested that Mrs. Clarke was an abominable woman, brilliantly clever, exquisitely subtle, who had chosen as an armor against suspicion a bold pretense of simplicity and harmless unconventionality, but who was the prey of a hidden and ungovernable vice.  He, Sir John, ventured to put forward for the jury’s careful examination a very different picture.  He made no secret of the fact that, from the point of view of the ordinary unconventional man or woman, Mrs. Clarke had often acted unwisely, and, with not too fine a sarcasm, he described for the jury the average existence of “a careful drab woman” in the watchful and eternally gossiping diplomatic world.  Then he contrasted with it the life led by Mrs. Clarke in the wonderful city of Stamboul—­a life “full of color, of taste, of interest, of charm, of innocent, joyous and fragrant liberty.  Which of us,” he demanded, “would not in our souls prefer the latter life to the former?  Which of us did not secretly long for the touch of romance, of strangeness, of beauty, to put something into our lives which they lacked?  But we have not the moral courage to break our prison doors and to emerge into the nobler world.”

“The dull, the drab, the platter-faced and platter-minded people,” he said, in a passage which Dion was always to remember, “who go forever bowed down beneath the heavy yoke of convention, are too often apt to think that everything charming, everything lively, everything unusual, everything which gives out, like sweet incense, a delicate aroma of strangeness, must be, somehow, connected with wickedness.  Everything which deviates from their pattern must deviate towards the devil, according to them; every step taken away from the beaten path must be taken towards ultimate destruction.  They have no conception of intimacies between women and men cemented not by similar lusts and similar vices, but by similar intellectual tastes and similar aspirations towards beauty.  In color such people always find blackness, in gaiety wickedness, in liberty license, in the sacred intimacies of the soul the hateful vices of the body.  But you, gentlemen of the jury——­”