To battle with them at close quarters, as presented by this able and courteous antagonist, who passed so easily and without presumption from the opponent into the teacher, was a more teasing matter.

She had many small successes and side-victories, but they soon ceased to satisfy her, in presence of the knowledge and ability of a man who had been ten years in Parliament, and had made for himself--she began to understand--a considerable position there.

She was hotly loyal to her own faiths; but she was conscious of what often seemed to her a dangerous and demoralizing interest in his! A demoralizing pleasure, too, in listening--in sometimes laying aside the watchful, hostile air, in showing herself sweet, yielding, receptive.
These melting moods, indeed, were rare.

But no one watching the two on this February evening could have failed to see in Diana signs of happiness, of a joyous and growing dependence, of something that refused to know itself, that masqueraded now as this feeling, now as that, yet was all the time stealing upon the sources of life, bewitching blood and brain.

Marsham lamented that in ten days he and his mother must be in town for the Parliamentary season.