Another calculator, an accustomed and lamentably-scrupulous arithmetician, had been at work for some time upon a speculative summing of the outlay of Diana’s establishment, as to its chances of swamping the income.  Redworth could guess pretty closely the cost of a house hold, if his care for the holder set him venturing on aver ages.  He knew nothing of her ten per cent. investment and considered her fixed income a beggarly regiment to marshal against the invader.  He fancied however, in his ignorance of literary profits, that a popular writer, selling several editions, had come to an El Dorado.  There was the mine.  It required a diligent worker.  Diana was often struck by hearing Redworth ask her when her next book might be expected.  He appeared to have an eagerness in hurrying her to produce, and she had to say that she was not a nimble writer.  His flattering impatience was vexatious.  He admired her work, yet he did his utmost to render it little admirable.  His literary taste was not that of young Arthur Rhodes, to whom she could read her chapters, appearing to take counsel upon them while drinking the eulogies:  she suspected him of prosaic ally wishing her to make money, and though her exchequer was beginning to know the need of it, the author’s lofty mind disdained such sordidness:  to be excused, possibly, for a failing productive energy.  She encountered obstacles to imaginative composition.  With the pen in her hand, she would fall into heavy musings; break a sentence to muse, and not on the subject.  She slept unevenly at night, was drowsy by day, unless the open air was about her, or animating friends.  Redworth’s urgency to get her to publish was particularly annoying when she felt how greatly the young minister of state would have been improved had she retained the work to brood over it, polish, re-write passages, perfect it.  Her musings embraced long dialogues of that work, never printed; they sprang up, they passed from memory; leaving a distaste for her present work:  The cantatrice:  far more poetical than the preceding, 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