unexplained. Aminta was one born to prize rectitude, to walk on the
traced line uprightly; and while the dark rose overflowed the soft brown
of her cheeks, under musings upon her unlicenced heart's doings
overnight, she not only pleaded for woeful creatures of her sex burdened
as she and erring, she weighed them in the scales with men, and put her
heart where Justice pointed, sending men to kick aloft.

Her husband, the man-riddle: she was unable to rede or read him. Her
will could not turn him; nor her tongue combat; nor was it granted her to
pique the mailed veteran. Every poor innocent little bit of an art had
been exhausted. Her title was Lady Ormont her condition actually slave.
A luxuriously established slave, consorting with a singularly
enfranchised set,--as, for instance, Mrs. Lawrence Finchley and Lord
Adderwood; Sir John Randeller and Lady Staines; Mrs. May, Amy May,
notorious wife of a fighting captain, the loneliest of blondes; and other
ladies, other gentlemen, Mr. Morsfield in the list, paired or not yet
paired: gossip raged. Aminta was of a disposition too generously cordial
to let her be the rigorous critic of people with whom she was in touch.
But her mind knew relief when she recollected that her humble little
school-mate, Selina Collect, who had suffered on her behalf in old days,
was coming up to her from the Suffolk coast on a visit for a week.
However much a slave and an unloved woman, she could be a constant and
protecting friend. Besides, Lord Ormont was gracious to little Selina.
She thought of his remarks about the modest-minded girl after first
seeing her. From that she struck upon a notion of reserves of humaneness
being in him, if she might find the path to them: and thence, fortified
by the repose her picture of little Selina's merit had bestowed, she
sprang to the idea of valiancy, that she would woo him to listen to her,
without inflicting a scene. He had been a listening lover, seeming
lover, once, later than the Granada sunsets. The letter in her jewel-box