feminine, of
a capital comrade. Her air of candour was her nature in her face; and
it carried a guileless roguery, a placid daring, a supersensual
naughtiness, a simplicity of repose amid the smoky reputation she
created, that led one to think the vapour calumnious or the creature
privileged. That young boy's look opened him at once; he had not to
warm to her,--he flew. Ordinarily the sweetest ladies will make us pass
through cold mist and cross a stile or two, or a broken bridge, before
the formalities are cleared away to grant us rights of citizenship. She
was like those frank lands where we have not to hand out a passport at
the frontier and wait for dubious inspection of it.

She prevailed with cognizant men and with the frivolous. Women were
capable of appreciating her, too: as Aminta did, despite some hinted
qualifications addressed shyly to her husband. But these were the very
matters exciting his particular esteem. He was of Lady Charlotte's mind,
in her hot zeal against injustice done to the creatures she despised;
and yet more than she applauded a woman who took up her idiot husband's
challenge to defend her good name, and cleared it, right or wrong, and
beat him down on his knees, and then started for her spell of the merry
canter over turf: an example to the English of the punishment they get
for their stupid Puritanic tyranny--sure to be followed by a national
helter-skelter down-hill headlong. And Mrs. Lawrence was not one of the
corrupt, he argued; she concealed what it was decent to conceal, without
pouting hypocritical pretences; she had merely dispensed with idle legal
formalities, in the prettiest curvetting airy wanton way, to divorce the
man who tried to divorce her, and 'whined to be forgiven when he found
he couldn't. Adderwood was ready to marry her to-morrow, if the donkey
husband would but go and bray his last. Half a dozen others were heads
off on the same course to that goal.'

That was her champion's perusal of a lady candidly asserting her right
to have breeched comrades, and paying for it in the advocacy which
compromises. She was taken to be and she was used as a weapon wherewith
to strike at our Pharisees. Women pushing out into the world for
independence, bleed heavy payments all round.

The earl's double-edged defence of her was partly a vindication of
another husband, who allowed his wife to call her friend; he was
nevertheless assured of her not being corrupt, both by his personal