part in it placidly, her skin burned. It was the beginning of tortures if

she stayed in England.

By staying to defend herself she forfeited her attitude of dignity and

lost all chance of her reward. And name the sort of world it is, dear

friends, for which we are to sacrifice our one hope of freedom, that we

may preserve our fair fame in it!

Diana cried aloud, 'My freedom!' feeling as a butterfly flown out of a

box to stretches of sunny earth beneath spacious heavens. Her bitter

marriage, joyless in all its chapters, indefensible where the man was

right as well as where insensately wrong, had been imprisonment. She

excused him down to his last madness, if only the bonds were broken.

Here, too, in this very house of her happiness with her father, she had

bound herself to the man voluntarily, quite inexplicably. Voluntarily, as

we say. But there must be a spell upon us at times. Upon young women

there certainly is.

The wild brain of Diana, armed by her later enlightenment as to the laws

of life and nature, dashed in revolt at the laws of the world when she

thought of the forces, natural and social, urging young women to marry

and be bound to the end.

It should be a spotless world which is thus ruthless.

But were the world impeccable it would behave more generously.

The world is ruthless, dear friends, because the world is hypocrite! The

world cannot afford to be magnanimous, or even just.

Her dissensions with her husband, their differences of opinion, and puny

wranglings, hoistings of two standards, reconciliations for the sake of

decency, breaches of the truce, and his detested meanness, the man behind

the mask; and glimpses of herself too, the half-known, half-suspected,

developing creature claiming to be Diana, and unlike her dreamed Diana,

deformed by marriage, irritable, acerb, rebellious, constantly

justifiable against him, but not in her own mind, and therefore accusing

him of the double crime of provoking her and perverting her--these were

the troops defiling through her head while she did battle with the

hypocrite world.

One painful sting was caused by the feeling that she could have

loved--whom? An ideal. Had he, the imagined but unvisioned, been her

yoke-fellow, would she now lie raising caged-beast cries in execration of

the yoke? She would not now be seeing herself as hare, serpent, tigress!

The hypothesis was reviewed in negatives: she had barely a sense of

softness, just a single little heave of the bosom, quivering upward and

leadenly sinking, when she glanced at a married Diana heartily mated. The

regrets of the youthful for a life sailing away under medical sentence of

death in the sad eyes of relatives resemble it. She could have loved.

Good-bye to that!

A woman's brutallest tussle with the world was upon her. She was in the

arena of the savage claws, flung there by the man who of all others

should have protected her from them. And what had she done to deserve it?

She listened to the advocate pleading her case; she primed him to admit

the charges, to say the worst, in contempt of legal prudence, and thereby

expose her transparent honesty. The very things awakening a mad suspicion

proved her innocence. But was she this utterly simple person? Oh, no! She

was the Diana of the pride in her power of fencing with evil--by no means

of the order of those ninny young women who realize the popular

conception of the purely innocent. She had fenced and kept her guard. Of

this it was her angry glory to have the knowledge. But she had been

compelled to fence. Such are men in the world of facts, that when a woman

steps out of her domestic tangle to assert, because it is a tangle, her

rights to partial independence, they sight her for their prey, or at

least they complacently suppose her accessible. Wretched at home, a woman

ought to bury herself in her wretchedness, else may she be assured that

not the cleverest, wariest guard will cover her character.

Against the husband her cause was triumphant. Against herself she decided

not to plead it, for this reason, that the preceding Court, which was the

public and only positive one, had entirely and justly exonerated her. But

the holding of her hand by the friend half a minute too long for

friendship, and the over-friendliness of looks, letters, frequency of

visits, would speak within her. She had a darting view of her husband's

estimation of them in his present mood. She quenched it; they were

trifles, things that women of the world have to combat. The revelation to

a fair-minded young woman of the majority of men being naught other than

men, and some of the friendliest of men betraying confidence under the

excuse of temptation, is one of the shocks to simplicity which leave her

the alternative of misanthropy or philosophy. Diana had not the heart to

hate her kind, so she resigned herself to pardon, and to the recognition

of the state of duel between the sexes-active enough in her sphere of

society. The circle hummed with it; many lived for it. Could she pretend

to ignore it? Her personal experience might have instigated a less clear

and less intrepid nature to take advantage of the opportunity for playing

the popular innocent, who runs about with astonished eyes to find herself

in so hunting a world, and wins general compassion, if not shelter in

unsuspected and unlicenced places. There is perpetually the inducement to

act the hypocrite before the hypocrite world, unless a woman submits to

be the humbly knitting housewife, unquestioningly worshipful of her lord;

for the world is ever gracious to an hypocrisy that pays homage to the

mask of virtue by copying it; the world is hostile to the face of an

innocence not conventionally simpering and quite surprised; the world

prefers decorum to honesty. 'Let me be myself, whatever the martyrdom!'

she cried, in that phase of young sensation when, to the blooming woman;

the putting on of a mask appears to wither her and reduce her to the show

she parades. Yet, in common with her sisterhood, she owned she had worn a

sort of mask; the world demands it of them as the price of their station.

That she had never worn it consentingly, was the plea for now casting it

off altogether, showing herself as she was, accepting martyrdom, becoming

the first martyr of the modern woman's cause--a grand position! and one

imaginable to an excited mind in the dark, which does not conjure a

critical humour, as light does, to correct the feverish sublimity. She

was, then, this martyr, a woman capable of telling the world she knew it,

and of, confessing that she had behaved in disdain of its rigider rules,

according to her own ideas of her immunities. O brave!

But was she holding the position by flight? It involved the challenge of

consequences, not an evasion of them.

She moaned; her mental steam-wheel stopped; fatigue brought sleep.

She had sensationally led her rebellious wits to The Crossways,

distilling much poison from thoughts on the way; and there, for the

luxury of a still seeming indecision, she sank into oblivion.