her bonnet; and why she
should have been guilty of this freak of riding in an unwholesome carriage,
tasked his power of guessing. He was too English even to have taken the
explanation, for he detested the distinguishing of the races in his country, and
could not therefore have comprehended her peculiar tenacity of the sense of
injury as long as enthusiasm did not arise to obliterate it. He required a
course of lessons in Irish.
    Sauntering down the lane, he called at Simon Rofe's cottage, and spoke very
kindly to the gamekeeper's wife. That might please Diana. It was all he could do
at present.
 

                                  Chapter XXI

                         »The Young Minister of State«

Descriptions in the newspapers of the rural funeral of Lord Dannisburgh had the
effect of rousing flights of tattlers with a twittering of the disused name of
Warwick; our social Gods renewed their combat, and the verdict of the jury was
again overhauled, to be attacked and maintained, the carpers replying to the
champions that they held to their view of it: as heads of bull-dogs are expected
to do when they have got a grip of one. It is a point of muscular honour with
them never to relax their hold. They will tell you why: - they formed that
opinion from the first. And but for the swearing of a particular witness, upon
whom the plaintiff had been taught to rely, the verdict would have been
different - to prove their soundness of judgement. They could speak from private
positive information of certain damnatory circumstances, derived from authentic
sources. Visits of a gentleman to the house of a married lady in the absence of
the husband? Oh! - The British Lucretia was very properly not legally at home to
the masculine world of that day. She plied her distaff in pure seclusion,
meditating on her absent lord; or else a fair proportion of the masculine world,
which had not yet, has not yet, doubled Cape Turk, approved her condemnation to
the sack.
    There was talk in the feminine world, at Lady Wathin's assemblies. The
elevation of her husband had extended and deepened her influence on the levels
where it reigned before, but without, strange as we may think it now, assisting
to her own elevation, much aspired for, to the smooth and lively upper pavement
of Society, above its tumbled strata. She was near that distinguished surface,
not on it. Her circle was practically the same as it was previous to the coveted
nominal rank enabling her to trample on those beneath it. And women like that
Mrs. Warwick, a woman of no birth,