The Testing of Diana Mallory

by Mrs. Humphry Ward

It was all struggle and effort. But it had brought her some reward. And especially through Marion Vincent's letters, and through the long day with Marion in London, which she had now to look back upon. For Miss Vincent and Frobisher had returned, and Marion was once more in her Stepney rooms. She was apparently not much worse; would allow no talk about herself; and though she had quietly relinquished all her old activities, her room was still the centre it had long been for the London thinker and reformer.

Diana found there an infinity to learn. The sages and saints, it seemed, are of all sides and all opinions. That had not been the lesson of her youth. In a comforting heat of prejudice her father had found relief from suffering, and his creeds had been fused with her young blood. Lately she had seen their opposites embodied in a woman from whom she shrank in repulsion--whose name never passed her lips--Oliver's sister--who had trampled on her in her misery. Yet here, in Marion's dingy lodging, she saw the very same ideas which Isabel Fotheringham made hateful, clothed in light, speaking from the rugged or noble faces of men and women who saw in them the salvation of their kind.

The intellect in Diana, the critical instinct resisted. And, moreover, to have abandoned any fraction of the conservative and traditional beliefs in which she had been reared was impossible for her of all women; it would have seemed to her that she was thereby leaving those two suffering ones, whom only her love sheltered, still lonelier in death. So, beneath the clatter of talk and opinion, run the deep omnipotent tides of our real being.

But if the mind resisted, the heart felt, and therewith, the soul--that total personality which absorbs and transmutes the contradictions of life--grew kinder and gentler within her.

One day, after a discussion on votes for women which had taken place beside Marion's sofa, Diana, when the talkers were gone, had thrown herself on her friend.

"Dear, you can't wish it!--you can't believe it! To brutalize--unsex us!"

Marion raised herself on her elbow, and looked down the narrow cross street beneath the windows of her lodging. It was a stifling evening. The street was strewn with refuse, the odors from it filled the room. Ragged children with smeared faces were sitting or playing listlessly in the gutters. The public-house at the corner was full of animation, and women were passing in and out. Through the roar of traffic from the main street beyond a nearer sound persisted: a note of wailing--the wailing of babes.

"There are the unsexed!" said Marion, panting. "Is their brutalization the price we pay for our refinement?" Then, as she sank back: "Try anything--everything--to change that."

Diana pressed the speaker's hand to her lips.

But from Marion Vincent, the girl's thoughts, as she wandered in the summer garden, had passed on to the news which Mrs. Roughsedge had brought her. Oliver was speaking every night, almost, in the villages round Beechcote. Last week he had spoken at Beechcote itself. Since Mrs. Roughsedge's visit, Diana had borrowed the local paper from Brown, and had read two of Oliver's speeches therein reported. As she looked up to the downs, or caught through the nearer trees the lines of distant woods, it was as though the whole scene--earth and air--were once more haunted for her by Oliver--his presence--his voice. Beechcote lay on the high-road from Tallyn to Dunscombe, the chief town of the division. Several times a week, at least, he must pass the gate. At any moment they might meet face to face.