She took her whipping within and without. 'On another occasion I shall
apply to you, Mr. Tonans.'

'Ah, there was a time when you could have been a treasure to me,' he
rejoined; alluding of course to the Dannisburgh days.

In dejection, as she mused on those days, and on her foolish ambition
to have a London house where her light might burn, she advised herself,
with Redworth's voice, to quit the house, arrest expenditure, and try
for happiness by burning and shining in the spirit: devoting herself,
as Arthur Rhodes did, purely to literature. It became almost a decision.

Percy she had still neither written to nor heard from, and she dared not
hope to meet him. She fancied a wish to have tidings of his marriage: it
would be peace; if in desolation. Now that she had confessed and given
her pledge to Emma, she had so far broken with him as to render the
holding him chained a cruelty, and his reserve whispered of a rational
acceptance of the end between them. She thanked him for it; an act
whereby she was: instantly melted to such softness that a dread of him
haunted her. Coward, take up your burden for armour! she called to her
poor dungeoned self wailing to have common nourishment. She knew how
prodigiously it waxed on crumbs; nay, on the imagination of small
morsels. By way of chastizing it, she reviewed her life, her behaviour
to her husband, until she sank backward to a depth deprived of air and
light. That life with her husband was a dungeon to her nature deeper
than any imposed by present conditions. She was then a revolutionary to
reach to the breath of day. She had now to be, only not a coward, and
she could breathe as others did. 'Women who sap the moral laws pull down
the pillars of the temple on their sex,' Emma had said. Diana perceived
something of her personal debt to civilization. Her struggles passed