on really poetical walks, and perfect sympathy, praised
to his face. Challenged by her initiative to a kind of language that threw
Redworth out, he declaimed: »We pace with some who make young morning stale.«
    »Oh! stale as peel of fruit long since consumed,« she chimed.
    And so they proceeded; and they laughed, Emma smiled a little, Redworth did
the same beneath one of his questioning frowns - a sort of fatherly grimace.
    A suspicion that this man, when infatuated, was able to practise the
absurdest benevolence, the burlesque of chivalry, as a man-admiring sex esteems
it, stirred very naughty depths of the woman in Diana, labouring under her
perverted mood. She put him to proof, for the chance of arming her wickedest to
despise him. Arthur was petted, consulted, cited, flattered all round; all but
caressed. She played, with a reserve, the maturish young woman smitten by an
adorable youth; and enjoyed doing it because she hoped for a visible effect -
more paternal benevolence - and could do it so dispassionately. Coquettry, Emma
thought, was most unworthily shown; and it was of the worst description.
Innocent of conspiracy, she had seen the array of Tony's lost household
treasures: she wondered at a heartlessness that would not even utter common
thanks to the friendly man for the compliment of prizing her portrait and the
things she had owned; and there seemed an effort to wound him.
    The invalided woman, charitable with allowances for her erratic husband,
could offer none for the woman of a long widowhood, that had become a trebly
sensitive maidenhood; abashed by her knowledge of the world, animated by her
abounding blood; cherishing her new freedom, dreading the menacer; feeling, that
though she held the citadel, she was daily less sure of its foundations, and
that her hope of some last romance in life was going; for in him shone not a
glimpse. He appeared to Diana as a fatal power, attracting her without sympathy,
benevolently overcoming: one of those good men, strong men, who subdue and do
not kindle. The enthralment revolted a nature capable of accepting subjection
only by burning. In return for his moral excellence, she gave him the moral
sentiments: esteem, gratitude, abstract admiration, perfect faith. But the man?
She could not now say she had never been loved; and a flood of tenderness rose
in her bosom, swelling from springs that she had previously reproved with a
desperate severity: the unhappy, unsatisfied yearning to be more than loved, to
love. It