, idle people of those regions.
    To Emma it seemed a not unnatural sensitiveness. She came to a settled
resolve in her thoughts, as she said, »They want a change. London is their
element.«
    Feeling that she deceived this true heart, however lightly and necessarily,
Diana warmed to her, forgiving her at last for having netted and dragged her
back to front the enemy; an imposition of horrors, of which the scene and the
travelling with Redworth, the talking of her case with her most intimate friend
as well, had been a distempering foretaste.
    They stood up and kissed, parting for the night.
    An odd world, where for the sin we have not participated in we must fib and
continue fibbing, she reflected. She did not entirely cheat her clearer mind,
for she perceived that her step in flight had been urged both by a weak
despondency and a blind desperation; also that the world of a fluid civilization
is perforce artificial. But her mind was in the background of her fevered
senses, and when she looked in the glass and mused on uttering the word, »Liar!«
to the lovely image, her senses were refreshed, her mind somewhat relieved, the
face appeared so sovereignly defiant of abasement.
    Thus did a nature distraught by pain obtain some short lull of repose. Thus,
moreover, by closely reading herself, whom she scourged to excess that she might
in justice be comforted, she gathered an increasing knowledge of our human
constitution, and stored matter for the brain.
 

                                  Chapter XIII

                    Touching the First Days of Her Probation

The result of her sleeping was, that Diana's humour, locked up over-night,
insisted on an excursion, as she lay with half-buried head and open eyelids,
thinking of the firm of lawyers she had to see; and to whom, and to the legal
profession generally, she would be, under outward courtesies, nothing other than
the woman Warwick. She pursued the woman Warwick unmercifully through a series
of interviews with her decorous and crudely-minded defenders; accurately
perusing them behind their senior staidness. Her scorching sensitiveness
sharpened her intelligence in regard to the estimate of discarded wives
entertained by men of business and plain men of the world, and she drove the
woman Warwick down their ranks, amazed by the vision of a puppet so unlike to
herself in reality, though identical in situation. That woman, reciting her side
of the case, gained a gradual resemblance to Danvers; she spoke primly;
perpetually the creature aired her handkerchief; she was bent on softening those
sugarloaves, the hard business-men applying
