out at last, with bitter mimicry,
'yang--yang--yang!' and killed the bright laugh, shot it dead. She had
outraged the decorum of the square-table only while the cards were
making. Perhaps her too-dead ensuing silence, as of one striving to bring
back the throbs to a slain bird in her bosom, allowed the gap between the
wedded pair to be visible, for it was dated back to prophecy as soon as
the trumpet proclaimed it.

But a multiplication of similar instances, which can serve no other
purpose than that of an apology, is a miserable vindication of innocence.
The more we have of them the darker the inference. In delicate situations
the chatterer is noxious. Mrs. Warwick had numerous apologists. Those
trusting to her perfect rectitude were rarer. The liberty she allowed
herself in speech and action must have been trying to her defenders in a
land like ours; for here, and able to throw its shadow on our giddy
upper-circle, the rigour of the game of life, relaxed though it may
sometimes appear, would satisfy the staidest whist-player. She did not
wish it the reverse, even when claiming a space for laughter: 'the breath
of her soul,' as she called it, and as it may be felt in the early youth
of a lively nature. She, especially, with her multitude of quick
perceptions and imaginative avenues, her rapid summaries, her sense of
the comic, demanded this aerial freedom.

We have it from Perry Wilkinson that the union of the divergent couple
was likened to another union always in a Court of Law. There was a
distinction; most analogies will furnish one; and here we see England and
Ireland changeing their parts, until later, after the breach, when the
Englishman and Irishwoman resumed a certain resemblance to the yoked
Islands.

Henry Wilmers, I have said, deals exclusively with the wit and charm of
the woman. He treats the scandal as we might do in like manner if her
story had not to be told. But these are not reporting columns; very
little of it shall trouble them. The position is faced, and that is all.
The position is one of the battles incident to women, their hardest. It
asks for more than justice from men, for generosity, our civilization not
being yet of the purest. That cry of hounds at her disrobing by Law is
instinctive. She runs, and they give tongue; she is a creature of the
chase. Let her escape unmangled, it will pass in the record that she did
once publicly run, and some old dogs will persist in thinking her
cunninge