le at forties and fifties. For their part they
anticipated cent. per cent. Mrs. Cherson said she wanted money, and had
therefore invested in the mine. It seemed so consequent, the cost of
things being enormous! She and her sister Mrs. Fryar-Gunnett owned
husbands who did their bidding, because of their having the brains, it
might be understood. Thus five thousand pounds invested would speedily
bring five thousand pounds per annum. Diana had often dreamed of the City
of London as the seat of magic; and taking the City's contempt for
authorcraft and the intangible as, from its point of view, justly
founded, she had mixed her dream strangely with an ancient notion of the
City's probity. Her broker's shaking head did not damp her ardour for
shares to the full amount of her ability to purchase. She remembered her
satisfaction at the allotment; the golden castle shot up from this
fountain mine. She had a frenzy for mines and fished in some English with
smaller sums. 'I am now a miner,' she had exclaimed, between dismay at
her audacity and the pride of it. Why had she not consulted Redworth? He
would peremptorily have stopped the frenzy in its first intoxicating
effervescence. She, like Mrs. Cherson, like all women who have plunged
upon the cost of things, wanted money. She naturally went to the mine.
Address him for counsel in the person of dupe, she could not; shame was a
barrier. Could she tell him that the prattle of a woman, spendthrift as
Mrs. Cherson, had induced her to risk her money? Latterly the reports of
Mrs. Fryar-Gunnett were not of the flavour to make association of their
names agreeable to his hearing.

She had to sit down in the buzz of her self-reproaches and amazement at
the behaviour of that reputable City, shrug, and recommence the labour of
her pen. Material misfortune had this one advantage; it kept her from
speculative thoughts of her lover, and the meaning of his absence and,
silence.

Diana's perusal of the incomplete CANTATRICE was done with the cold
critical eye interpreting for the public. She was forced to write on
nevertheless, and exactly in the ruts of the foregoing matter. It
propelled her. No longer perversely, of necessity she wrote her best,
convinced that the work was doomed to unpopularity, resolved that it
should be at least a victory in style. A fit of angry cynicism now and
then set her composing phrases as baits for the critics to quote,
condemnatory of the attractiveness of the work