She examined her accounts.  The Debit and Credit sides presented much of the appearance of male and female in our jog-trot civilization.  They matched middling well; with rather too marked a tendency to strain the leash and run frolic on the part of friend Debit (the wanton male), which deepened the blush of the comparison.  Her father had noticed the same funny thing in his effort to balance his tugging accounts:  ’Now then for a look at Man and Wife’:  except that he made Debit stand for the portly frisky female, Credit the decorous and contracted other half, a prim gentleman of a constitutionally lean habit of body, remonstrating with her.  ’You seem to forget that we are married, my dear, and must walk in step or bundle into the Bench,’ Dan Merion used to say.

Diana had not so much to rebuke in Mr. Debit; or not at the first reckoning.  But his ways were curious.  She grew distrustful of him, after dismissing him with a quiet admonition and discovering a series of ambush bills, which he must have been aware of when he was allowed to pass as an honourable citizen.  His answer to her reproaches pleaded the necessitousness of his purchases and expenditure:  a capital plea; and Mrs. Credit was requested by him, in a courteous manner, to drive her pen the faster, so that she might wax to a corresponding size and satisfy the world’s idea of fitness in couples.  She would have costly furniture, because it pleased her taste; and a French cook, for a like reason, in justice to her guests; and trained servants; and her tribe of pensioners; flowers she would have profuse and fresh at her windows and over the rooms; and the pictures and engravings on the walls were (always for the good reason mentioned) choice ones; and she had a love of old lace, she loved colours as she loved cheerfulness, and silks, and satin hangings, Indian ivory carvings, countless mirrors, Oriental woods, chairs and desks with some feature or a flourish in them, delicate tables with antelope legs, of approved workmanship in the chronology of European upholstery, and marble clocks of cunning device to symbol Time, mantelpiece decorations, illustrated editions of her favourite authors; her bed-chambers, too, gave the nest for sleep a dainty cosiness in aerial draperies.  Hence, more or less directly, the peccant bills.  Credit was reduced to reckon to a nicety the amount she could rely on positively:  her fixed income from her investments and the letting of The Crossways:  the days of half-yearly payments that would magnify her to some proportions beside the alarming growth of her partner, who was proud of it, and referred her to the treasures she could summon with her pen, at a murmur of dissatisfaction.  His compliments were sincere; they were seductive.  He assured her that she had struck a rich vein in an inexhaustible mine; by writing only a very little faster she could double her income; counting a broader popularity, treble it; and so on a tide of success down the widening river to a sea sheer golden.  Behold how it sparkles!  Are we then to stint our winged hours of youth for want of courage to realize the riches we can command?  Debit was eloquent, he was unanswerable.