she found Whitmonby cool; he complained of the coolness of her letter of adieu; complained of her leaving London so long.  How could she expect to be his Queen of the London Salon if she lost touch of the topics?  He made no other allusion.  They were soon on amicable terms, at the expense of flattering arts that she had not hitherto practised.  But Westlake revealed unimagined marvels of the odd corners of the masculine bosom.  He was the man of her circle the neatest in epigram, the widest of survey, an Oriental traveller, a distinguished writer, and if not personally bewitching, remarkably a gentleman of the world.  He was wounded; he said as much.  It came to this:  admitting that he had no claims, he declared it to be unbearable for him to see another preferred.  The happier was unmentioned, and Diana scraped his wound by rallying him.  He repeated that he asked only to stand on equal terms with the others; her preference of one was past his tolerance.  She told him that since leaving Lady Dunstane she had seen but Whitmonby, Wilmers, and him.  He smiled sarcastically, saying he had never had a letter from her, except the formal one of invitation.

‘Powers of blarney, have you forsaken a daughter of Erin?’ cried Diana.  ’Here is a friend who has a craving for you, and I talk sense to him.  I have written to none of my set since I last left London.’

She pacified him by doses of cajolery new to her tongue.  She liked him, abhorred the thought of losing any of her friends, so the cajoling sentences ran until Westlake betrayed an inflammable composition, and had to be put out, and smoked sullenly.  Her resources were tried in restoring him to reason.  The months of absence from London appeared to have transformed her world.  Tonans was moderate.  The great editor rebuked her for her prolonged absence from London, not so much because it discrowned her as Queen of the Salon, but candidly for its rendering her service less to him.  Everything she knew of men and affairs was to him stale.

‘How do you get to the secrets?’ she asked.

‘By sticking to the centre of them,’ he said.

‘But how do you manage to be in advance and act the prophet?’

‘Because I will have them at any price, and that is known.’

She hinted at the peccant City Company.

‘I think I have checked the mining mania, as I did the railway,’ said he; ‘and so far it was a public service.  There’s no checking of maniacs.’

She took her whipping within and without.  ’On another occasion I shall apply to you, Mr. Tonans.’

‘Ah, there was a time when you could have been a treasure to me,’ he rejoined; alluding of course to the Dannisburgh days.

In dejection, as she mused on those days, and on her foolish ambition to have a London house where her light might burn, she advised herself, with Redworth’s voice, to quit the house, arrest expenditure, and try for happiness by burning and shining in the spirit:  devoting herself, as Arthur Rhodes did, purely to literature.  It became almost a decision.