an elder sister of the pretty Mrs. Fryar-Gunnett, had talked to her of the cost of things one afternoon at Lady Singleby’s garden-party, and spoken of the City as the place to help to swell an income, if only you have an acquaintance with some of the chief City men.  The great mine was named, and the rush for allotments.  She knew a couple of the Directors.  They vowed to her that ten per cent. was a trifle; the fortune to be expected out of the mine was already clearly estimable at forties and fifties.  For their part they anticipated cent. per cent.  Mrs. Cherson said she wanted money, and had therefore invested in the mine.  It seemed so consequent, the cost of things being enormous!  She and her sister Mrs. Fryar-Gunnett owned husbands who did their bidding, because of their having the brains, it might be understood.  Thus five thousand pounds invested would speedily bring five thousand pounds per annum.  Diana had often dreamed of the City of London as the seat of magic; and taking the City’s contempt for authorcraft and the intangible as, from its point of view, justly founded, she had mixed her dream strangely with an ancient notion of the City’s probity.  Her broker’s shaking head did not damp her ardour for shares to the full amount of her ability to purchase.  She remembered her satisfaction at the allotment; the golden castle shot up from this fountain mine.  She had a frenzy for mines and fished in some English with smaller sums.  ‘I am now a miner,’ she had exclaimed, between dismay at her audacity and the pride of it.  Why had she not consulted Redworth?  He would peremptorily have stopped the frenzy in its first intoxicating effervescence.  She, like Mrs. Cherson, like all women who have plunged upon the cost of things, wanted money.  She naturally went to the mine.  Address him for counsel in the person of dupe, she could not; shame was a barrier.  Could she tell him that the prattle of a woman, spendthrift as Mrs. Cherson, had induced her to risk her money?  Latterly the reports of Mrs. Fryar-Gunnett were not of the flavour to make association of their names agreeable to his hearing.

She had to sit down in the buzz of her self-reproaches and amazement at the behaviour of that reputable City, shrug, and recommence the labour of her pen.  Material misfortune had this one advantage; it kept her from speculative thoughts of her lover, and the meaning of his absence and, silence.

Diana’s perusal of the incomplete cantatrice was done with the cold critical eye interpreting for the public.  She was forced to write on nevertheless, and exactly in the ruts of the foregoing matter.  It propelled her.  No longer perversely, of necessity she wrote her best, convinced that the work was doomed to unpopularity, resolved that it should be at least a victory in style.  A fit of angry cynicism now and then set her composing phrases as baits for the critics to quote, condemnatory of the attractiveness of the work.  Her mood was bad.