whom subsequently she said: 'Emmy, there are wounds that cut sharp as the
enchanter's sword, and we don't know we are in halves till some rough old
intimate claps us on the back, merely to ask us how we are! I have to
join myself together again, as well as I can. It's done, dear; but don't
notice the cement.'

'You will be brave,' Emma petitioned.

'I long to show you I will.'

The meeting with those who could guess a portion of her story, did not
disconcert her. To Lady Pennon and Lady Singleby, she was the brilliant
Diana of her nominal luminary issuing from cloud. Face and tongue, she
was the same; and once in the stream, she soon gathered its current
topics and scattered her arrowy phrases. Lady Pennon ran about with
them, declaring that the beautiful speaker, if ever down, was up, and up
to her finest mark. Mrs. Fryar-Gannett had then become the blazing
regnant antisocial star; a distresser of domesticity, the magnetic
attraction in the spirituous flames of that wild snapdragon bowl, called
the Upper class; and she was angelically blonde, a straw-coloured Beauty.
'A lovely wheat sheaf, if the head were ripe,' Diana said of her.

'Threshed, says her fame, my dear,' Lady Pennon replied, otherwise
allusive.

'A wheatsheaf of contention for the bread of wind,' said Diana, thinking
of foolish Sir Lukin; thoughtless of talking to a gossip.

She would have shot a lighter dart, had she meant it to fly and fix.