Diana smoothed her wrists, compressing her lips not to laugh at the simulation of an attitude of combat.  She took up her pen.

And strange to think, she could have flowed away at once on the stuff that Danvers delighted to read!—­wicked princes, rogue noblemen, titled wantons, daisy and lily innocents, traitorous marriages, murders, a gallows dangling a corpse dotted by a moon, and a woman bowed beneath.  She could have written, with the certainty that in the upper and the middle as well as in the lower classes of the country, there would be a multitude to read that stuff, so cordially, despite the gaps between them, are they one in their literary tastes.  And why should they not read it?  Her present mood was a craving for excitement; for incident, wild action, the primitive machinery of our species; any amount of theatrical heroics, pathos, and clown-gabble.  A panorama of scenes came sweeping round her.

She was, however, harnessed to a different kind of vehicle, and had to drag it.  The sound of the house-door shutting, imagined perhaps, was a fugitive distraction.  Now to animate The Man of Two Minds!

He is courting, but he is burdened with the task of tasks.  He has an ideal of womanhood and of the union of couples:  a delicacy extreme as his attachment:  and he must induce the lady to school herself to his ideal, not allowing her to suspect him less devoted to her person; while she, an exacting idol, will drink any quantity of idealization as long as he starts it from a full acceptance of her acknowledged qualities.  Diana could once have tripped the scene along airily.  She stared at the opening sentence, a heavy bit of moralized manufacture, fit to yoke beside that on her view of her bank-book.

‘It has come to this—­I have no head,’ she cried.

And is our public likely to muster the slightest taste for comic analysis that does not tumble to farce?  The doubt reduced her whole Ms. to a leaden weight, composed for sinking.  Percy’s addiction to burlesque was a further hindrance, for she did not perceive how her comedy could be strained to gratify it.

There was a knock, and Danvers entered.  ’You have apparently a liking for late hours,’ observed her mistress.  ‘I told you to go to bed.’  ’It is Mr. Dacier,’ said Danvers.  ‘He wishes to see me?’ ’Yes, ma’am.  He apologized for disturbing you.’  ‘He must have some good reason.’  What could it be!  Diana’s glass approved her appearance.  She pressed the black swell of hair above her temples, rather amazed, curious, inclined to a beating of the heart.

CHAPTER XXXI

A chapter containing great political news and therewith an intrusion of the love-god

Dacier was pacing about the drawing-room, as in a place too narrow for him.

Diana stood at the door.  ’Have you forgotten to tell me anything I ought to know?’