if taken at all: Disguise degraded her to
the reptiles.

This was faced. Consequently there was no fear of it.

She had very easily proved that she had skill and self-possession to keep
him rational, and therefore they could continue to meet. A little
outburst of frenzy to a reputably handsome woman could be treated as the
froth of a passing wave. Men have the trick, infants their fevers.

Diana's days were spent in reasoning. Her nights were not so tuneable to
the superior mind. When asleep she was the sport of elves that danced her
into tangles too deliciously unravelled, and left new problems for the
wise-eyed and anxious morning. She solved them with the thought that in
sleep it was the mere ordinary woman who fell a prey to her tormentors;
awake, she dispersed the swarm, her sky was clear. Gradually the
persecution ceased, thanks to her active pen.

A letter from her legal adviser, old Mr. Braddock, informed her that no
grounds existed for apprehending marital annoyance, and late in May her
household had resumed its customary round.

She examined her accounts. The Debit and Credit sides presented much of
the appearance of male and female in our jog-trot civilization. They
matched middling well; with rather too marked a tendency to strain the
leash and run frolic on the part of friend Debit (the wanton male), which
deepened the blush of the comparison. Her father had noticed the same
funny thing in his effort to balance his tugging accounts: 'Now then for
a look at Man and Wife': except that he made Debit stand for the portly
frisky female, Credit the decorous and contracted other half, a prim
gentleman of a constitutionally lean habit of body, remonstrating with
her. 'You seem to forget that we are married, my dear, and must walk in
step or bundle into the Bench,' Dan Merion used to say.

Diana had not so much to rebuke in Mr. Debit; or not at the first
reckoning. But his ways were curious. She grew distrustful of him, after
dismissing him with a quiet admonition and discovering a series of ambush
bills, which he must have been aware of when he was allowed to pass as an
honourable citizen. His answer to her reproaches pleaded the
necessitousness of his purchases and expenditure: a capital plea; and
Mrs. Credit was requested by him, in a courteous manner, to drive her pen
the faster, so that she might wax to a corresponding size and satisfy the
world's idea of fitness in couples. She would have costly furniture