in the opinion of Arthur Rhodes; and the story was more romantic; modelled on a Prima Donna she had met at the musical parties of Henry Wilmers, after hearing Redworth tell of Charles Rainer’s quaint passion for the woman, or the idea of the woman.  Diana had courted her, studied and liked her.  The picture she was drawing of the amiable and gifted Italian, of her villain Roumanian husband, and of the eccentric, high-minded, devoted Englishman, was good in a fashion; but considering the theme, she had reasonable apprehension that her cantatrice would not repay her for the time and labour bestowed on it.  No clever transcripts of the dialogue of the day occurred; no hair-breadth ’scapes, perils by sea and land, heroisms of the hero, fine shrieks of the heroine; no set scenes of catching pathos and humour; no distinguishable points of social satire—­equivalent to a smacking of the public on the chaps, which excites it to grin with keen discernment of the author’s intention.  She did not appeal to the senses nor to a superficial discernment.  So she had the anticipatory sense of its failure; and she wrote her best, in perverseness; of course she wrote slowly; she wrote more and more realistically of the characters and the downright human emotions, less of the wooden supernumeraries of her story, labelled for broad guffaw or deluge tears—­the grappling natural links between our public and an author.  Her feelings were aloof.  They flowed at a hint of a scene of the young Minister.  She could not put them into the cantatrice.  And Arthur Rhodes pronounced this work poetical beyond its predecessors, for the reason that the chief characters were alive and the reader felt their pulses.  He meant to say, they were poetical inasmuch as they were creations.

The slow progress of a work not driven by the author’s feelings necessitated frequent consultations between Debit and Credit, resulting in altercations, recriminations, discord of the yoked and divergent couple.  To restore them to their proper trot in harness, Diana reluctantly went to her publisher for an advance item of the sum she was to receive, and the act increased her distaste.  An idea came that she would soon cease to be able to write at all.  What then?  Perhaps by selling her invested money, and ultimately The Crossways, she would have enough for her term upon earth.  Necessarily she had to think that short, in order to reckon it as nearly enough.  ‘I am sure,’ she said to herself, ‘I shall not trouble the world very long.’  A strange languor beset her; scarcely melancholy, for she conceived the cheerfulness of life and added to it in company; but a nervelessness, as though she had been left by the stream on the banks, and saw beauty and pleasure sweep along and away, while the sun that primed them dried her veins.  At this time she was gaining her widest reputation for brilliancy of wit.  Only to welcome guests were her evenings