'To the mind of me,' said Diana, and observed Emma's rather saddened
eyelids for a proof that schemes to rob her of dear liberty were
certainly planned.

They conversed of expeditions to Redworth's Berkshire mansion, and to
The Crossways, untenanted at the moment, as he had informed Emma, who
fancied it would please Tony to pass a night in the house she loved; but
as he was to be of the party she coldly acquiesced.

The woman of flesh refuses pliancy when we want it of her, and will
not, until it is her good pleasure, be bent to the development called
a climax, as the puppet-woman, mother of Fiction and darling of the
multitude! ever amiably does, at a hint of the Nuptial Chapter. Diana in
addition sustained the weight of brains. Neither with waxen optics nor
with subservient jointings did she go through her pathways of the world.
Her direct individuality rejected the performance of simpleton, and her
lively blood, the warmer for its containment quickened her to penetrate
things and natures; and if as yet, in justness to the loyal male friend,
she forbore to name him conspirator, she read both him and Emma, whose
inner bosom was revealed to her, without an effort to see. But her
characteristic chasteness of mind, not coldness of the 'blood,--which
had supported an arduous conflict, past all existing rights closely to
depict, and which barbed her to pierce to the wishes threatening her
freedom, deceived her now to think her flaming blushes came of her
relentless divination on behalf of her recovered treasure: whereby the
clear reading of others distracted the view of herself. For one may be
the cleverest alive, and still hoodwinked while blood is young and warm.

The perpetuity of the contrast presented to her reflections, of
Redworth's healthy, open, practical, cheering life, and her own
freakishly interwinding, darkly penetrative, simulacrum of a life,
cheerless as well as useless, forced her humiliated consciousness by
degrees, in spite of pride, to the knowledge that she was engaged in
a struggle with him; and that he was the stronger;--it might be, the
worthier: she thought him the handsomer. He throve to the light of
day, and she spun a silly web that meshed her in her intricacies. Her
intuition of Emma's wishes led to this; he was constantly before
her. She tried to laugh at the image of the concrete cricketer,
half-flannelled, and red of face: the 'lucky calculator,' as she named
him to Emma, who shook her he