no dolly-dolly
compliance, and muses on actual life, and fatigues with the exercise of
brains, and is in sooth an alien: a princess of her kind and time, but
a foreign one, speaking a language distinct from the mercantile,
trafficking in ideas:--this is the problem. For to be true to her, one
cannot attempt at propitiation. She said worse things of the world
than that which was conveyed to the boxed ears of Mrs. Fryar-Gunnett.
Accepting the war declared against her a second time, she performed
the common mental trick in adversity of setting her personally known
innocence to lessen her generally unknown error--but anticipating that
this might become known, and the other not; and feeling that the motives
of the acknowledged error had served to guard her from being the
culprit of the charge she writhed under, she rushed out of a meditation
compounded of mind and nerves, with derision of the world's notion of
innocence and estimate of error. It was a mood lasting through her stay
in London, and longer, to the discomfort of one among her friends; and
it was worthy of The Anti-climax Expedition, as she called it.

For the rest, her demeanour to the old monster world exacting the
servility of her, in repayment for its tolerating countenance, was
faultless. Emma beheld the introduction to Mrs. Warwick of his bride,
by Mr. Percy Dacier. She had watched their approach up the Ball-room,
thinking, how differently would Redworth and Tony have looked.
Differently, had it been Tony and Dacier: but Emma could not persuade
herself of a possible harmony between them, save at the cost of Tony's
expiation of the sin of the greater heart in a performance equivalent
to Suttee. Perfectly an English gentleman of the higher order, he seemed
the effigy of a tombstone one, fixed upright, and civilly proud of his
effigy bride. So far, Emma considered them fitted. She perceived his
quick eye on her corner of the room; necessarily, for a man of his
breeding, without a change of expression. An emblem pertaining to her
creed was on the heroine's neck; also dependant at her waist. She was
white from head to foot; a symbol of purity. Her frail smile appeared
deeply studied in purity. Judging from her look and her reputation,
Emma divined that the man was justly mated with a devious filmy
sentimentalist, likely to 'fiddle harmonics on the sensual strings'
for him at a mad rate in the years to come. Such fiddling is indeed the
peculiar diversion of the op