 gain his seat.
    »It seems to us unnecessary to heap on coal when the chimney is afire; but
he may know the proper course,« Diana said, convulsing Danvers; and there was
discernibly to Redworth, under the influence of her phrases, a likeness of the
flaming half-horse, with the animals all smoking in the frost, to a railway
engine. »Your wrinkled centaur,« she named the man. Of course he had to play
second to her, and not unwillingly; but he reflected passingly on the
instinctive push of her rich and sparkling voluble fancy to the initiative,
which women do not like in a woman, and men prefer to distantly admire. English
women and men feel toward the quick-witted of their species as to aliens, having
the demerits of aliens - wordiness, vanity, obscurity, shallowness, an empty
glitter, the sin of posturing. A quick-witted woman exerting her wit is both a
foreigner and potentially a criminal. She is incandescent to a breath of rumour.
It accounted for her having detractors; a heavy counterpoise to her enthusiastic
friends. It might account for her husband's discontent - the reduction of him to
a state of mere masculine antagonism. What is the husband of a vanward woman? He
feels himself but a diminished man. The English husband of a voluble woman
relapses into a dreary mute. Ah, for the choice of places! Redworth would have
yielded her the loquent lead for the smallest of the privileges due to him who
now rejected all, except the public scourging of her. The conviction was in his
mind that the husband of this woman sought rather to punish than be rid of her.
But a part of his own emotion went to form the judgement.
    Furthermore, Lady Dunstane's allusion to her enemies made him set down her
growing crop of backbiters to the trick she had of ridiculing things English. If
the English do it themselves, it is in a professionally robust, a jocose, kindly
way, always with a glance at the other things, great things, they excel in; and
it is done to have the credit of doing it. They are keen to catch an inimical
tone; they will find occasion to chastise the presumptuous individual, unless it
be the leader of a party, therefore a power; for they respect a power. Redworth
knew their quaintnesses; without overlooking them he winced at the acid of an
irony that seemed to spring from aversion, and regretted it, for her sake. He
had to recollect that she was in a sharp-strung mood, bitterly surexcited;
