Diana chatted spiritedly to young Rhodes on their drive to the train.  She was profoundly discouraged by Emma’s disapproval of her work.  It wanted but that one drop to make a recurrence to the work impossible.  There it must lie!  And what of the aspects of her household?—­Perhaps, after all, the Redworths of the world are right, and Literature as a profession is a delusive pursuit.  She did not assent to it without hostility to the world’s Redworths.—­’They have no sensitiveness, we have too much.  We are made of bubbles that a wind will burst, and as the wind is always blowing, your practical Redworths have their crow of us.’

She suggested advice to Arthur Rhodes upon the prudence of his resuming the yoke of the Law.

He laughed at such a notion, saying that he had some expectations of money to come.

‘But I fear,’ said he, ’that Lady Dunstane is very very ill.  She begged me to keep her informed of your address.’

Diana told him he was one of those who should know it whithersoever she went.  She spoke impulsively, her sentiments of friendliness for the youth being temporarily brightened by the strangeness of Emma’s conduct in deputing it to him to fulfil a duty she had never omitted.  ’What can she think I am going to do!’

On her table at home lay, a letter from Mr. Warwick.  She read it hastily in the presence of Arthur Rhodes, having at a glance at the handwriting anticipated the proposal it contained and the official phrasing.

Her gallant squire was invited to dine with her that evening, costume excused.

They conversed of Literature as a profession, of poets dead and living, of politics, which he abhorred and shied at, and of his prospects.  He wrote many rejected pages, enjoyed an income of eighty pounds per annum, and eked out a subsistence upon the modest sum his pen procured him; a sum extremely insignificant; but great Nature was his own, the world was tributary to him, the future his bejewelled and expectant bride.  Diana envied his youthfulness.  Nothing is more enviable, nothing richer to the mind, than the aspect of a cheerful poverty.  How much nobler it was, contrasted with Redworth’s amassing of wealth!

When alone, she went to her bedroom and tried to write, tried to sleep.  Mr. Warwick’s letter was looked at.  It seemed to indicate a threat; but for the moment it did not disturb her so much as the review of her moral prostration.  She wrote some lines to her lawyers, quoting one of Mr. Warwick’s sentences.  That done, his letter was dismissed.  Her intolerable languor became alternately a defeating drowsiness and a fever.  She succeeded in the effort to smother the absolute cause:  it was not suffered to show a front; at the cost of her knowledge of a practised self-deception.  ’I wonder whether the world is as bad as a certain class of writers tell us!’ she sighed in weariness, and mused on their soundings and probings of poor humanity,