ng griffin; until an
idea, instead of the monster bird, struck her. Might she not, after
all, be cowering under imagination? The very maidenly idea wakened
her womanliness--to reproach her remainder of pride, not to see more
accurately. It was the reason why she resolved, against Emma's extreme
entreaties, to take lodgings in the South valley below the heights,
where she could be independent of fancies and perpetual visitors,
but near her beloved at any summons of urgency; which Emma would not
habitually send because of the coming of a particular gentleman. Dresses
were left at Copsley for dining and sleeping there upon occasion, and
poor Danvers, despairing over the riddle of her mistress, was condemned
to the melancholy descent.

'It's my belief,' she confided to Lady Dunstane's maid Bartlett, 'she'll
hate men all her life after that Mr. Dacier.'

If women were deceived, and the riddle deceived herself, there is excuse
for a plain man like Redworth in not having the slightest clue to the
daily shifting feminine maze he beheld. The strange thing was, that
during her maiden time she had never been shifty or flighty, invariably
limpid and direct.

CHAPTER XLI. CONTAINS A REVELATION OF THE ORIGIN OF THE TIGRESS IN DIANA

An afternoon of high summer blazed over London through the City's
awning of smoke, and the three classes of the population, relaxed by
the weariful engagement with what to them was a fruitless heat, were
severally bathing their ideas in dreams of the contrast possible to
embrace: breezy seas or moors, aerial Alps, cool beer. The latter, if
confessedly the lower comfort, is the readier at command; and Thomas
Redworth, whose perspiring frame was directing his inward vision to
fly for solace to a trim new yacht, built on his lines, beckoning from
Southampton Water, had some of the amusement proper to things plucked
off the levels, in the conversation of a couple of journeymen close
ahead of him, as he made his way from a quiet street of brokers' offices
to a City Bank. One asked the other if he had ever tried any of that
cold stuff they were now selling out of barrows, with cream. His
companion answered, that he had not got much opinion of stuff of the
sort; and what was it like?

'Well, it's cheap, it ain't bad; it's cooling. But it ain't refreshing.'

'Just what I reckoned all that newfangle rubbish.'

Without a consultation, the conservatives in beverage filed with a smart
turn about, worthy