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, in the opinion of
Arthur Rhodes; and the story was more romantic; modelled on a Prima
Donna she had met at the musical parties of Henry Wilmers, after hearing
Redworth tell of Charles Rainer's quaint passion for the woman, or the
idea of the woman. Diana had courted her, studied and liked her. The
picture she was drawing of the amiable and gifted Italian, of her
villain Roumanian husband, and of the eccentric, high-minded, devoted
Englishman, was good in a fashion; but considering the theme, she had
reasonable apprehension that her CANTATRICE would not repay her for the
time and labour bestowed on it. No clever transcripts of the dialogue
of the day occurred; no hair-breadth 'scapes, perils by sea and land,
heroisms of the hero, fin