he? Some day,
when we are past his repeating it, I'll thank him.'

The fact of her smiling happily at the narration of Sullivan Smith's
absurd proposal by mediatrix, proved to Emma how much her nature
thirsted for the smallest support in her self-esteem.

The second campaign of London was of bad augury at the commencement,
owing to the ridiculous intervention of a street-organ, that ground its
pipes in a sprawling roar of one of the Puritani marches, just as the
carriage was landing them at the door of her house. The notes were
harsh, dissonant, drunken, interlocked and horribly torn asunder,
intolerable to ears not keen to extract the tune through dreadful
memories. Diana sat startled and paralyzed. The melody crashed a revival
of her days with Dacier, as in gibes; and yet it reached to her heart.
She imagined a Providence that was trying her on the threshold, striking
at her feebleness. She had to lock herself in her room for an hour of
deadly abandonment to misery, resembling the run of poison through
her blood, before she could bear to lift eyes on her friend; to whom
subsequently she said: 'Emmy, there are wounds that cut sharp as the
enchanter's sword, and we don't know we are in halves till some rough
old intimate claps us on the back, merely to ask us how we are! I have
to join myself together again, as well as I can. It's done, dear; but
don't notice the cement.'

'You will be brave,' Emma petitioned.

'I long to show you I will.'

The meeting with those who could guess a portion of her story, did not
disconcert her. To Lady Pennon and Lady Singleby, she was the brilliant
Diana of her nominal luminary issuing from cloud. Face and tongue, she
was the same; and once in the stream, she soon gathered its current
topics and scattered her arrowy phrases. Lady Pennon ran about with
them, declaring that the beautiful speaker, if ever down, was up, and
up to her finest mark. Mrs. Fryar-Gannett had then become the blazing
regnant antisocial star; a distresser of domesticity, the magnetic
attraction in the spirituous flames of that wild snapdragon bowl,
called the Upper class; and she was angelically blonde, a straw-coloured
Beauty. 'A lovely wheat sheaf, if the head were ripe,' Diana said of
her.

'Threshed, says her fame, my dear,' Lady Pennon replied, otherwise
allusive.

'A wheatsheaf of contention for the bread of wind,' said Diana, thinking
of foolish Sir Lukin; thoughtless of talking to a gossip.

She w