 the step into Society without the where-withal
to support her position there. Girls of her kind, airing their wings above the
sphere of their birth, are cryingly adventuresses. As adventuresses they are
treated. Vain to be shrewish with the world! Rather let us turn and scold our
nature for irreflectively rushing to the cream and honey! Had she subsisted on
her small income in a country cottage, this task of writing would have been
holiday. Or better, if, as she preached to Mary Paynham, she had apprenticed
herself to some productive craft. The simplicity of the life of labour looked
beautiful. What will not look beautiful contrasted with the fly in the web? She
had chosen to be one of the flies of life.
    Instead of running to composition, her mind was eloquent with a sermon to
Arthur Rhodes, in Redworth's vein; more sympathetically, of course. »For I am
not one of the lecturing Mammonites!« she could say.
    She was far from that. Penitentially, in the thick of her disdain of the
arrogant money-getters, she pulled out a drawer where her bank-book lay, and
observed it contemplatively; jotting down a reflection before the dread book of
facts was opened: »Gaze on the moral path you should have taken, you are asked
for courage to commit a sanctioned suicide, by walking back to it stripped - a
skeleton self.« She sighed forth: »But I have no courage: I never had!«
    The book revealed its tale in a small pencilled computation of the
bank-clerk's, on the peccant side. Credit presented many pages blanks. She
seemed to have withdrawn from the struggle with such a partner.
    It signified an immediate appeal to the usurers, unless the publisher could
be persuaded, with three parts of the book in his hands, to come to the rescue.
Work! roared old Debit, the sinner turned slavedriver.
    Diana smoothed her wrists, compressing her lips not to laugh at the
simulation of an attitude of combat. She took up her pen.
    And strange to think, she could have flowed away at once on the stuff that
Danvers delighted to read! - wicked princes, rogue noblemen, titled wantons,
daisy and lily innocents, traitorous marriages, murders, a gallows dangling a
corpse dotted by a moon, and a woman bowed beneath. She could have written, with
the certainty that in the upper and the middle as well as in the lower classes
of the country, there would be a multitude to read that stuff, so cordially,
despite the gaps between them
