’Not good news of Lord D. I have had messages.  Mr. Dacier conceals his alarm.  The Princess gave great gratification.  She did me her best service there.  Is it not cruel that the interdict of the censor should force me to depend for information upon such scraps as I get from a gentleman passing my habitation on his way to the House?  And he is not, he never has been, sympathetic in that direction.  He sees my grief, and assumes an undertakerly air, with some notion of acting in concert, one supposes little imagining how I revolt from that crape-hatband formalism of sorrow!

’One word of her we call our inner I. I am not drawing upon her resources for my daily needs; not wasting her at all, I trust; certainly not walling her up, to deafen her voice.  It would be to fall away from you.  She bids me sign myself, my beloved, ever, ever your Tony.’

The letter had every outward show of sincereness in expression, and was endowed to wear that appearance by the writer’s impulse to protest with so resolute a vigour as to delude herself.  Lady Dunstane heard of Mr. Dacier’s novel attendance at concerts.  The world made a note of it; for the gentleman was notoriously without ear for music.

Diana’s comparison of her hours of incessant writing to her walks under the dawn at Lugano, her boast of the similarity of her delight in both, deluded her uncorrupted conscience to believe that she was now spiritually as free:  as in that fair season of the new spring in her veins.  She, was not an investigating physician, nor was Lady Dunstane, otherwise they would have examined the material points of her conduct—­ indicators of the spiritual secret always.  What are the patient’s acts?  The patient’s, mind was projected too far beyond them to see the fore finger they stretched at her; and the friend’s was not that of a prying doctor on the look out for betraying symptoms.  Lady Dunstane did ask herself why Tony should have incurred the burden of a costly household—­ a very costly:  Sir Lukin had been at one of Tony’s little’ dinners:  but her wish to meet the world on equal terms, after a long dependency, accounted for it in seeming to excuse.  The guests on the occasion were Lady Pennon.  Lady Singleby, Mr. Whitmonby, Mr. Percy Dacier, Mr. Tonans; —­’Some other woman,’ Sir Lukin said, and himself.  He reported the cookery as matching the:  conversation, and that was princely; the wines not less—­an extraordinary fact to note of a woman.  But to hear Whitmonby and Diana Warwick!  How he told a story, neat as a postman’s knock, and she tipped it with a remark and ran to a second, drawing in Lady Pennon, and then Dacier, ‘and me!’ cried Sir Lukin; ’she made us all toss the ball from hand to hand, and all talk up to the mark; and none of us noticed that we all went together to the drawing-room, where we talked for another hour, and broke up fresher than we began.’

’That break between the men and the women after dinner was Tony’s aversion, and I am glad she has instituted a change,’ said Lady Dunstane.