arily, Diana warmed to her, forgiving her at last for having netted
and dragged her back to front the enemy; an imposition of horrors, of
which the scene and the travelling with Redworth, the talking of her case
with her most intimate friend as well, had been a distempering foretaste.

They stood up and kissed, parting for the night.

An odd world, where for the sin we have not participated in we must fib
and continue fibbing, she reflected. She did not entirely cheat her
clearer mind, for she perceived that her step in flight had been urged
both by a weak despondency and a blind desperation; also that the world
of a fluid civilization is perforce artificial. But her mind was in the
background of her fevered senses, and when she looked in the glass and
mused on uttering the word, 'Liar!' to the lovely image, her senses were
refreshed, her mind somewhat relieved, the face appeared so sovereignly
defiant of abasement.

Thus did a nature distraught by pain obtain some short lull of repose.
Thus, moreover, by closely reading herself, whom she scourged to excess
that she might in justice be comforted, she gathered an increasing
knowledge of our human constitution, and stored matter for the brain.

CHAPTER XIII

TOUCHING THE FIRST DAYS OF HER PROBATION

The result of her sleeping was, that Diana's humour, locked up overnight,
insisted on an excursion, as she lay with half-buried head and open
eyelids, thinking of the firm of lawyers she had to see; and to whom, and
to the legal profession generally, she would be, under outward
courtesies, nothing other than 'the woman Warwick.' She pursued the woman
Warwick unmercifully through a series of interviews with her decorous and
crudely-minded defenders; accurately perusing them behind their senior
staidness. Her scorching sensitiveness sharpened her intelligence in
regard to the estimate of discarded wives entertained by men of business
and plain men of the world, and she drove the woman Warwick down their
ranks, amazed by the vision of a puppet so unlike to herself in reality,
though identical in situation. That woman, reciting her side of the case,
gained a gradual resemblance to Danvers; she spoke primly; perpetually
the creature aired her handkerchief; she was bent on softening those
sugarloaves, the hard business-men applying to her for facts. Facts were
treated as unworthy of her; mere stuff of the dustheap, mutton-bones, old
shoes; she swam above them in a cocoon