if less than a reaping harvester: which verily for women to hear, is to
stamp a substantial damnatory verification upon the delivery of the saying: -
    »Mrs. Warwick says of you, that you 're a bundle of straws for everybody and
bread for nobody.«
    Or, stranger speculation, through what, and what number of conduits,
curious, and variously colouring, did it reach the fair Amabel of the
infant-in-cradle smile, in that deformation of the original utterance! To pursue
the thing, would be to enter the subtersensual perfumed caverns of a Romance of
Fashionable Life, with no hope of coming back to light, other than by tail of
lynx, like the great Arabian seaman, at the last page of the final chapter. A
prospectively popular narrative indeed! and coin to reward it, and applause. But
I am reminded that a story properly closed on the marriage of the heroine
Constance and her young Minister of State, has no time for conjuring chemists'
bouquet of aristocracy to lure the native taste. When we have satisfied English
sentiment, our task is done, in every branch of art, I hear: and it will account
to posterity for the condition of the branches. Those yet wakeful eccentrics
interested in such a person as Diana, to the extent of remaining attentive till
the curtain falls, demand of me to gather-up the threads concerning her: which
my gardener sweeping his pile of dead leaves before the storm and night, advises
me to do speedily. But it happens that her resemblance to her sex and species of
a civilized period plants the main threads in her bosom. Rogues and a policeman,
or a hurried change of front of all the actors, are not a part of our slow
machinery.
    Nor is she to show herself to advantage. Only those who read her woman's
blood and character with the head, will care for Diana of the Crossways now that
the knot of her history has been unravelled. Some little love they must have for
her likewise: and how it can be quickened on behalf of a woman who never
sentimentalizes publicly, and has no dolly-dolly compliance, and muses on actual
life, and fatigues with the exercise of brains, and is in sooth an alien: a
princess of her kind and time, but a foreign one, speaking a language distinct
from the mercantile, trafficking in ideas: - this is the problem. For to be true
to her, one cannot attempt at propitiation. She said worse things of the world
than that which was conveyed to the boxed ears of Mrs. Fryar