 ventured to suggest
measures.«
    »He listens to you, Tony?«
    »He says I have brains. It ends in a compliment.«
    »You have inspired Mr. Redworth.«
    »If I have, I have lived for some good.«
    Altogether her Tony's conversation proved to Emma that her perusal of the
model of THE YOUNG MINISTER OF STATE was an artist's, free, open, and not
discoloured by the personal tincture. Her heart plainly was free and
undisturbed. She had the same girl's love of her walks where wildflowers grew;
if possible, a keener pleasure. She hummed of her happiness in being at Copsley,
singing her Planxty Kelly and The Puritani by turns. She stood on land: she was
not on the seas. Emma thought so with good reason.
    She stood on land, it was true, but she stood on a cliff of the land, the
seas below and about her; and she was enabled to hoodwink her friend because the
assured sensation of her firm footing deceived her own soul, even while it took
short flights to the troubled waters. Of her firm footing she was exultingly
proud. She stood high, close to danger, without giddiness. If at intervals her
soul flew out like lightning from the rift (a mere shot of involuntary fancy, it
seemed to her), the suspicion of instability made her draw on her treasury of
impressions of the mornings at Lugano - her loftiest, purest, dearest; and these
reinforced her. She did not ask herself why she should have to seek them for
aid. In other respects her mind was alert and held no sly covers, as the fiction
of a perfect ignorant innocence combined with common intelligence would have us
to suppose that the minds of women can do. She was honest as long as she was not
directly questioned, pierced to the innermost and sanctum of the bosom. She
could honestly summon bright light to her eyes in wishing the man were married.
She did not ask herself why she called it up. The remorseless progressive
interrogations of a Jesuit Father in pursuit of the bosom's verity might have
transfixed it and shown her to herself even then a tossing vessel as to the
spirit, far away from that firm land she trod so bravely.
    Descending from the woody heights upon London, Diana would have said that
her only anxiety concerned young Mr. Arthur Rhodes, whose position she
considered precarious, and who had recently taken a drubbing for venturing to
show a peep of his head, like an early crocus, in the literary market. Her
ANTONIA'
