 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
