, in expiation, professes
piety, fearful of a discovered Omnipotence, which is in the image of themselves
and captain. Their old habits are not quite abandoned, and their new one is used
as a lash to whip the exposed of us for a propitiation of the capricious
potentate whom they worship in the place of the true God.«
    Lady Dunstane sniffed. »I smell the leading article.«
    Diana joined with her smile, »No, the style is rather different.«
    »Have you not got into a trick of composing in speaking, at times?«
    Diana confessed, »I think I have at times. Perhaps the daily writing of all
kinds and the nightly talking ... I may be getting strained.«
    »No, Tony; but longer visits in the country to me would refresh you. I miss
your lighter touches. London is a school, but, you know it, not a school for
comedy nor for philosophy; that is gathered on my hills, with London distantly
in view, and then occasional descents on it well digested.«
    »I wonder whether it is affecting me!« said Diana, musing. »A metropolitan
hack! and while thinking myself free, thrice harnessed; and all my fun gone. Am
I really as dull as a tract, my dear? I must be, or I should be proving the
contrary instead of asking. My pitfall is to fancy I have powers equal to the
first look-out of the eyes of the morning. Enough of me. We talked of Mary
Paynham. If only some right good man would marry her!«
    Lady Dunstane guessed at the right good man in Diana's mind. »Do you bring
them together?«
    Diana nodded, and then shook doleful negatives to signify no hope.
    »None whatever - if we mean the same person,« said Lady Dunstane, bethinking
her, in the spirit of wrath she felt at such a scheme being planned by Diana to
snare the right good man, that instead of her own true lover Redworth, it might
be only Percy Dacier. So filmy of mere sensations are these little ideas as they
flit in converse, that she did not reflect on her friend's ignorance of
Redworth's love of her, or on the unlikely choice of one in Dacier's high
station to reinstate a damsel.
    They did not name the person.
    »Passing the instance, which is cruel, I will be just to society thus far,«
said Diana. »I was in a boat at Richmond last week, and Leander was