‘Our Parliament is now sitting, and you drive ladies,’ Diana replied.

‘I hope I know one, never mind the hour,’ said he of the capes.

He was bidden to drive rapidly.

‘Complexion a tulip:  you do not often see a pale cabman,’ she remarked to Danvers, who began laughing, as she always expected to do on an excursion with her mistress.

’Do you remember, ma’am, the cabman taking us to the coach, when you thought of going to the continent?’

‘And I went to The Crossways?  I have forgotten him.’

’He declared you was so beautiful a lady he would drive you to the end of England for nothing.’

’It must have been when I was paying him.  Put it out of your mind, Danvers, that there are individual cabmen.  They are the painted flowers of our metropolitan thoroughfares, and we gather them in rows.’

‘They have their feelings, ma’am.’

‘Brandied feelings are not pathetic to me.’

‘I like to think kindly of them,’ Danvers remarked, in reproof of her inhumanity; adding:  ‘They may overturn us!’ at which Diana laughed.  Her eyes were drawn to a brawl of women and men in the street.  ’Ah! that miserable sight!’ she cried.  ‘It is the everlasting nightmare of London.’

Danvers humped, femininely injured by the notice of it.  She wondered her mistress should deign to.

Rolling on between the blind and darkened houses, Diana transferred her sensations to them, and in a fit of the nerves imagined them beholding a funeral convoy without followers.

They came in view of the domed cathedral, hearing, in a pause of the wheels, the bell of the hour.  ‘Faster—­faster! my dear man,’ Diana murmured, and they entered a small still square of many lighted windows.

‘This must be where the morrow is manufactured,’ she said.  ’Tell the man to wait.—­Or rather it’s the mirror of yesterday:  we have to look backward to see forward in life.’

She talked her cool philosophy to mask her excitement from herself.  Her card, marked:  ‘Imperative-two minutes,’ was taken up to Mr. Tonans.  They ascended to the editorial ante-room.  Doors opened and shut, hasty feet traversed the corridors, a dull hum in dumbness told of mighty business at work.  Diana received the summons to the mighty head of the establishment.  Danvers was left to speculate.  She heard the voice of Mr. Tonans:  ‘Not more than two!’ This was not a place for compliments.  Men passed her, hither and yonder, cursorily noticing the presence of a woman.  She lost, very strangely to her, the sense of her sex and became an object—­a disregarded object.  Things of more importance were about.  Her feminine self-esteem was troubled; all idea of attractiveness expired.  Here was manifestly a spot where women had dropped from the secondary to the cancelled stage of their extraordinary career in a world either blowing them aloft like soap-bubbles or quietly shelving them as supernumeraries.