its
failure; and she wrote her best, in perverseness; of course she wrote
slowly; she wrote more and more realistically of the characters and the
downright human emotions, less of the wooden supernumeraries of her
story, labelled for broad guffaw or deluge tears--the grappling natural
links between our public and an author. Her feelings were aloof. They
flowed at a hint of a scene of THE YOUNG MINISTER. She could not put them
into THE CANTATRICE. And Arthur Rhodes pronounced this work poetical
beyond its predecessors, for the reason that the chief characters were
alive and the reader felt their pulses. He meant to say, they were
poetical inasmuch as they were creations.

The slow progress of a work not driven by the author's feelings
necessitated frequent consultations between Debit and Credit, resulting
in altercations, recriminations, discord of the yoked and divergent
couple. To restore them to their proper trot in harness, Diana
reluctantly went to her publisher for an advance item of the sum she was
to receive, and the act increased her distaste. An idea came that she
would soon cease to be able to write at all. What then? Perhaps by
selling her invested money, and ultimately The Crossways, she would have
enough for her term upon earth. Necessarily she had to think that short,
in order to reckon it as nearly enough. 'I am sure,' she said to herself,
'I shall not trouble the world very long.' A strange languor beset her;
scarcely melancholy, for she conceived the cheerfulness of life and added
to it in company; but a nervelessness, as though she had been left by the
stream on the banks, and saw beauty and pleasure sweep along and away,
while the sun that primed them dried her veins. At this time she was
gaining her widest reputation for brilliancy of wit. Only to welcome
guests were her evenings ever spent at home. She had no intimate
understanding of the deadly wrestle of the conventional woman with her
nature which she was undergoing below the surface. Perplexities she
acknowledged, and the prudence of guardedness. 'But as I am sure not to
live very long, we may as well meet.' Her meetings with Percy Dacier were
therefore hardly shunned; and his behaviour did not warn her to
discountenance them. It would have been cruel to exclude him from her
select little dinners of eight. Whitmonby, Westlake, Henry Wilmers and
the rest, she perhaps aiding, schooled him in the conversational art. She
heard it said of him, that t