the peccant bills.  Credit was reduced to reckon to a nicety the amount she could rely on positively:  her fixed income from her investments and the letting of The Crossways:  the days of half-yearly payments that would magnify her to some proportions beside the alarming growth of her partner, who was proud of it, and referred her to the treasures she could summon with her pen, at a murmur of dissatisfaction.  His compliments were sincere; they were seductive.  He assured her that she had struck a rich vein in an inexhaustible mine; by writing only a very little faster she could double her income; counting a broader popularity, treble it; and so on a tide of success down the widening river to a sea sheer golden.  Behold how it sparkles!  Are we then to stint our winged hours of youth for want of courage to realize the riches we can command?  Debit was eloquent, he was unanswerable.

Another calculator, an accustomed and lamentably-scrupulous arithmetician, had been at work for some time upon a speculative summing of the outlay of Diana’s establishment, as to its chances of swamping the income.  Redworth could guess pretty closely the cost of a house hold, if his care for the holder set him venturing on aver ages.  He knew nothing of her ten per cent. investment and considered her fixed income a beggarly regiment to marshal against the invader.  He fancied however, in his ignorance of literary profits, that a popular writer, selling several editions, had come to an El Dorado.  There was the mine.  It required a diligent worker.  Diana was often struck by hearing Redworth ask her when her next book might be expected.  He appeared to have an eagerness in hurrying her to produce, and she had to say that she was not a nimble writer.  His flattering impatience was vexatious.  He admired her work, yet he did his utmost to render it little admirable.  His literary taste was not that of young Arthur Rhodes, to whom she could read her chapters, appearing to take counsel upon them while drinking the eulogies:  she suspected him of prosaic ally wishing her to make money, and though her exchequer was beginning to know the need of it, the author’s lofty mind disdained such sordidness:  to be excused, possibly, for a failing productive energy.  She encountered obstacles to imaginative composition.  With the pen in her hand, she would fall into heavy musings; break a sentence to muse, and not on the subject.  She slept unevenly at night, was drowsy by day, unless the open air was about her, or animating friends.  Redworth’s urgency to get her to publish was particularly annoying when she felt how greatly the young Minister of state would have been improved had she retained the work to brood over it, polish, re-write passages, perfect it.  Her musings embraced long dialogues of that work, never printed; they sprang up, they passed from memory; leaving a distaste for her present work:  The cantatrice:  far more poetical than the preceding,