’In justice let me add that I have not been troubled by hearing of any of the mysterious legal claims, et caetera.  I am sorry to hear bad reports of health.  I wish him entire felicity—­no step taken to bridge division!  The thought of it makes me tigrish.

’A new pianist playing his own pieces (at Lady Singleby’s concert) has given me exquisite pleasure’ and set me composing songs—­not to his music, which could be rendered only by sylphs moving to “soft recorders” in the humour of wildness, languor, bewitching caprices, giving a new sense to melody.  How I wish you had been with me to hear him!  It was the most AEolian thing ever caught from a night-breeze by the soul of a poet.

’But do not suppose me having headlong tendencies to the melting mood.  (The above, by the way, is a Pole settled in Paris, and he is to be introduced to me at Lady Pennon’s.)—­What do you say to my being invited by Mr. Whitmonby to aid him in writing leading articles for the paper he is going to conduct! “write as you talk and it will do,” he says.  I am choosing my themes.  To write—­of politics—­as I talk, seems to me like an effort to jump away from my shadow.  The black dog of consciousness declines to be shaken off.  If some one commanded me to talk as I write!  I suspect it would be a way of winding me up to a sharp critical pitch rapidly.

’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