riting leading articles for the paper he
is going to conduct! "write as you talk and it will do," he says. I am
choosing my themes. To write--of politics--as I talk, seems to me like an
effort to jump away from my shadow. The black dog of consciousness
declines to be shaken off. If some one commanded me to talk as I write! I
suspect it would be a way of winding me up to a sharp critical pitch
rapidly.

'Not good news of Lord D. I have had messages. Mr. Dacier conceals his
alarm. The PRINCESS gave great gratification. She did me her best service
there. Is it not cruel that the interdict of the censor should force me
to depend for information upon such scraps as I get from a gentleman
passing my habitation on his way to the House? And he is not, he never
has been, sympathetic in that direction. He sees my grief, and assumes an
undertakerly air, with some notion of acting in concert, one supposes
little imagining how I revolt from that crape-hatband formalism of
sorrow!

'One word of her we call our inner I. I am not drawing upon her resources
for my daily needs; not wasting her at all, I trust; certainly not
walling her up, to deafen her voice. It would be to fall away from you.
She bids me sign myself, my beloved, ever, ever your Tony.'

The letter had every outward show of sincereness in expression, and was
endowed to wear that appearance by the writer's impulse to protest with
so resolute a vigour as to delude herself. Lady Dunstane heard of Mr.
Dacier's novel attendance at concerts. The world made a note of it; for
the gentleman was notoriously without ear for music.

Diana's comparison of her hours of incessant writing to her walks under
the dawn at Lugano, her boast of the similarity of her delight in both,
deluded her uncorrupted conscience to believe that she was now
spiritually as free: as in that fair season of the new spring in her
veins. She, was not an investigating physician, nor was Lady Dunstane,
otherwise they would have examined the material points of her
conduct--indicators of the spiritual secret always. What are the
patient's acts? The patient's, mind was projected too far beyond them to
see the fore finger they stretched at her; and the friend's was not that
of a prying doctor on the look out for betraying symptoms. Lady Dunstane
did ask herself why Tony should have incurred the burden of a costly
household--a very costly: Sir Lukin had been at one of Tony's little'
dinners: but her wish to meet