ive one's life. Placing her on a lower pedestal in
her self-esteem, the philosophy of youth revived her; and if the
abatement of her personal pride was dispiriting, she began to see an
advantage in getting inward eyes.

'It's infinitely better I should know it, Emmy--I'm a reptile! Pleasure
here, pleasure there, I'm always thinking of pleasure. I shall give up
thinking and take to drifting. Neither of us can do more than open
purses; and mine's lean. If the old Crossways had no tenant, it would be
a purse all mouth. And charity is haunted, like everything we do. Only I
say with my whole strength yes, I am sure, in spite of the men professing
that they are practical, the rich will not move without a goad. I have
and hold--you shall hunger and covet, until you are strong enough to
force my hand:--that 's the speech of the wealthy. And they are
Christians. In name. Well, I thank heaven I'm at war, with myself.'

'You always manage to strike out a sentence worth remembering, Tony,'
said Lady Dunstane. 'At war with ourselves, means the best happiness we
can have.'

It suited her, frail as her health was, and her wisdom striving to the
spiritual of happiness. War with herself was far from happiness in the
bosom of Diana. She wanted external life, action, fields for energies, to
vary the struggle. It fretted and rendered her ill at ease. In her
solitary rides with Sir Lukin through a long winter season, she appalled
that excellent but conventionally-minded gentleman by starting, nay
supporting, theories next to profane in the consideration of a
land-owner. She spoke of Reform: of the Repeal of the Corn Laws as the
simple beginning of the grants due to the people. She had her ideas, of
course, from that fellow Redworth, an occasional visitor at Copsley; and
a man might be a donkey and think what he pleased, since he had a
vocabulary to back his opinions. A woman, Sir Lukin held, was by nature a
mute in politics. Of the thing called a Radical woman, he could not
believe that she was less than monstrous: 'with a nose,' he said; and
doubtless, horse teeth, hatchet jaws, slatternly in the gown, slipshod,
awful. As for a girl, an unmarried, handsome girl, admittedly beautiful,
her interjections, echoing a man, were ridiculous, and not a little
annoying now and them, for she could be piercingly sarcastic. Her
vocabulary in irony was a quiverful. He admired her and liked her
immensely; complaining only of her turn for unfeminine top