ersonal risk immediately.

CHAPTER XXIII

RECORDS A VISIT TO DIANA FROM ONE OF THE WORLD'S GOOD WOMEN

Pure disengagement of contemplativeness had selected. Percy Dacier as the
model of her YOUNG MINISTER OF STATE, Diana supposed. Could she otherwise
have dared to sketch him? She certainly would not have done it now.

That was a reflection similar to what is entertained by one who has
dropped from a precipice to the midway ledge over the abyss, where
caution of the whole sensitive being is required for simple
self-preservation. How could she have been induced to study and portray
him! It seemed a form of dementia.

She thought this while imagining the world to be interrogating her. When
she interrogated herself, she flew to Lugano and her celestial Salvatore,
that she might be defended from a charge of the dreadful weakness of her
sex. Surely she there had proof of her capacity for pure disengagement.
Even in recollection the springs of spiritual happiness renewed the
bubbling crystal play. She believed that a divineness had wakened in her
there, to strengthen her to the end, ward her from any complicity in her
sex's culprit blushing.

Dacier's cry of her name was the cause, she chose to think, of the
excessive circumspection she must henceforth practise; precariously
footing, embracing hardest earth, the plainest rules, to get back to
safety. Not that she was personally endangered, or at least not
spiritually; she could always fly in soul to her heights. But she had now
to be on guard, constantly in the fencing attitude. And watchful of
herself as well. That was admitted with a ready frankness, to save it
from being a necessitated and painful confession: for the
voluntary-acquiescence, if it involved her in her sex, claimed an
individual exemption. 'Women are women, and I am a woman but I am I, and
unlike them: I see we are weak, and weakness tempts: in owning the
prudence of guarded steps, I am armed. It is by dissembling, feigning
immunity, that we are imperilled.' She would have phrased it so, with
some anger at her feminine nature as well as at the subjection forced on
her by circumstances.

Besides, her position and Percy Dacier's threw the fancied danger into
remoteness. The world was her stepmother, vigilant to become her judge;
and the world was his taskmaster, hopeful of him, yet able to strike him
down for an offence. She saw their situation as he did. The course of
folly must be bravely taken,