They rose from table at ten, with the satisfaction of knowing that they had not argued, had not wrangled, had never stagnated, and were digestingly refreshed; as it should be among grown members of the civilized world, who mean to practise philosophy, making the hour of the feast a balanced recreation and a regeneration of body and mind.

‘Evenings like these are worth a pilgrimage,’ Emma said, embracing Tony outside the drawing-room door.  ’I am so glad I came:  and if I am strong enough, invite me again in the Spring.  To-morrow early I start for Copsley, to escape this London air.  I shall hope to have you there soon.’

She was pleased by hearing Tony ask her whether she did not think that Arthur Rhodes had borne himself well; for it breathed of her simply friendly soul.

The gentlemen followed Lady Dunstane in a troop, Dacier yielding perforce the last adieu to young Rhodes.

Five minutes later Diana was in her dressing-room, where she wrote at night, on the rare occasions now when she was left free for composition.  Beginning to dwell on the man of two minds, she glanced at the woman likewise divided, if not similarly; and she sat brooding.  She did not accuse her marriage of being the first fatal step:  her error was the step into Society without the wherewithal 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-Betters, 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.