The visionary figure of Mr. Tonans petrified by the great news, drinking it, and confessing her ahead of him in the race for secrets, arose toweringly.  She had not ever seen the Editor in his den at midnight.  With the rumble of his machinery about him, and fresh matter arriving and flying into the printing-press, it must be like being in the very furnace-hissing of Events:  an Olympian Council held in Vulcan’s smithy.  Consider the bringing to the Jove there news of such magnitude as to stupefy him!  He, too, who had admonished her rather sneeringly for staleness in her information.  But this news, great though it was, and throbbing like a heart plucked out of a breathing body, throbbed but for a brief term, a day or two; after which, great though it was, immense, it relapsed into a common organ, a possession of the multitude, merely historically curious.

‘You are not afraid of the streets at night?’ Diana said to her maid, as they were going upstairs.

‘Not when we’re driving, ma’am,’ was the answer.

The man of two minds faced his creatrix in the dressing-room, still delivering that most ponderous of sentences—­a smothering pillow!

I have mistaken my vocation, thought Diana:  I am certainly the flattest proser who ever penned a line.

She sent Dangers into the bedroom on a trifling errand, unable to bear the woman’s proximity, and oddly unwilling to dismiss her.

She pressed her hands on her eyelids.  Would Percy have humiliated her so if he had respected her?  He took advantage of the sudden loss of her habitual queenly initiative at the wonderful news to debase and stain their intimacy.  The lover’s behaviour was judged by her sensations:  she felt humiliated, plucked violently from the throne where she had long been sitting securely, very proudly.  That was at an end.  If she was to be better than the loathsomest of hypocrites, she must deny him his admission to the house.  And then what was her life!

Something that was pressing her low, she knew not how, and left it unquestioned, incited her to exaggerate the indignity her pride had suffered.  She was a dethroned woman.  Deeper within, an unmasked actress, she said.  Oh, she forgave him!  But clearly he took her for the same as other women consenting to receive a privileged visitor.  And sounding herself to the soul, was she so magnificently better?  Her face flamed.  She hugged her arms at her breast to quiet the beating, and dropped them when she surprised herself embracing the memory.  He had brought political news, and treated her as—­name the thing!  Not designedly, it might be:  her position invited it.  ‘The world had given her to him.’  The world is always a prophet of the mire; but the world is no longer an utterly mistaken world.  She shook before it.

She asked herself why Percy or the world should think highly of an adventuress, who was a denounced wife, a wretched author, and on the verge of bankruptcy.  She was an adventuress.  When she held The Crossways she had at least a bit of solid footing:  now gone.  An adventuress without an idea in her head:  witness her dullard, The Man of Two Minds, at his work of sermonizing his mistress.