her to conceal
her dislike of the place in love: cat's love, she owned. Here, she
confessed to Diana, she would wish to live to her end. It seemed remote,
where an invigorating upper air gave new bloom to her cheeks; but she
kept one secret from her friend.

Copsley was an estate of nearly twelve hundred acres, extending across
the ridge of the hills to the slopes North and South. Seven counties
rolled their backs under this commanding height, and it would have tasked
a pigeon to fly within an hour the stretch of country visible at the
Copsley windows. Sunrise to right, sunset leftward, the borders of the
grounds held both flaming horizons. So much of the heavens and of earth
is rarely granted to a dwelling. The drawback was the structure, which
had no charm, scarce a face. 'It is written that I should live in
barracks,' Lady Dunstane said. The colour of it taught white to impose a
sense of gloom. Her cat's love of the familiar inside corners was never
able to embrace the outer walls. Her sensitiveness, too, was racked by
the presentation of so pitiably ugly a figure to the landscape. She
likened it to a coarse-featured country wench, whose cleaning and
decorating of her countenance makes complexion grin and ruggedness yawn.
Dirty, dilapidated, hung with weeds and parasites, it would have been
more tolerable. She tried the effect of various creepers, and they were
as a staring paint. What it was like then, she had no heart to say.

One may, however, fall on a pleasurable resignation in accepting great
indemnities, as Diana bade her believe, when the first disgust began to
ebb. 'A good hundred over there would think it a Paradise for an asylum':
she signified London. Her friend bore such reminders meekly. They were
readers of books of all sorts, political, philosophical, economical,
romantic; and they mixed the diverse readings in thought, after the
fashion of the ardently youthful. Romance affected politics, transformed
economy, irradiated philosophy. They discussed the knotty question, Why
things were not done, the things being confessedly to do; and they cut
the knot: Men, men calling themselves statesmen, declined to perform that
operation, because, forsooth, other men objected to have it performed on
them. And common humanity declared it to be for the common weal! If so,
then it is clearly indicated as a course of action: we shut our eyes
against logic and the vaunted laws of economy. They are the knot we cut;
or w