hip, and the over-friendliness of looks, letters, frequency of
visits, would speak within her. She had a darting view of her husband's
estimation of them in his present mood. She quenched it; they were
trifles, things that women of the world have to combat. The revelation to
a fair-minded young woman of the majority of men being naught other than
men, and some of the friendliest of men betraying confidence under the
excuse of temptation, is one of the shocks to simplicity which leave her
the alternative of misanthropy or philosophy. Diana had not the heart to
hate her kind, so she resigned herself to pardon, and to the recognition
of the state of duel between the sexes-active enough in her sphere of
society. The circle hummed with it; many lived for it. Could she pretend
to ignore it? Her personal experience might have instigated a less clear
and less intrepid nature to take advantage of the opportunity for playing
the popular innocent, who runs about with astonished eyes to find herself
in so hunting a world, and wins general compassion, if not shelter in
unsuspected and unlicenced places. There is perpetually the inducement to
act the hypocrite before the hypocrite world, unless a woman submits to
be the humbly knitting housewife, unquestioningly worshipful of her lord;
for the world is ever gracious to an hypocrisy that pays homage to the
mask of virtue by copying it; the world is hostile to the face of an
innocence not conventionally simpering and quite surprised; the world
prefers decorum to honesty. 'Let me be myself, whatever the martyrdom!'
she cried, in that phase of young sensation when, to the blooming woman;
the putting on of a mask appears to wither her and reduce her to the show
she parades. Yet, in common with her sisterhood, she owned she had worn a
sort of mask; the world demands it of them as the price of their station.
That she had never worn it consentingly, was the plea for now casting it
off altogether, showing herself as she was, accepting martyrdom, becoming
the first martyr of the modern woman's cause--a grand position! and one
imaginable to an excited mind in the dark, which does not conjure a
critical humour, as light does, to correct the feverish sublimity. She
was, then, this martyr, a woman capable of telling the world she knew it,
and of, confessing that she had behaved in disdain of its rigider rules,
according to her own ideas of her immunities. O brave!

But was she holding the position b