upon his estate in Scotland. They summoned young
Arthur Rhodes to the island, that he might have a taste of the new
scenes. Diana was always wishing for his instruction and refreshment;
and Redworth came to spend a Saturday and Sunday with them, and showed
his disgust of the idle boy, as usual, at the same time consulting them
on the topic of furniture for the Berkshire mansion he had recently
bought, rather vaunting the Spanish pictures his commissioner in Madrid
was transmitting. The pair of rebels, vexed by his treatment of the
respectful junior, took him for an incarnation of their enemy, and
pecked and worried the man astonishingly. He submitted to it like the
placable giant. Yes, he was a Liberal, and furnishing and decorating the
house in the stability of which he trusted. Why not? We must accept the
world as it is, try to improve it by degrees.--Not so: humanity will
not wait for you, the victims are shrieking beneath the bricks of your
enormous edifice, behind the canvas of your pictures. 'But you may
really say that luxurious yachting is an odd kind of insurgency,' avowed
Diana. 'It's the tangle we are in.'

'It's the coat we have to wear; and why fret at it for being
comfortable?'

'I don't half enough, when I think of my shivering neighbours.'

'Money is of course a rough test of virtue,' said Redworth. 'We have no
other general test.'

Money! The ladies proclaimed it a mere material test; Diana, gazing on
sunny sea, with an especial disdain. And name us your sort of virtue.
There is more virtue in poverty, He denied that. Inflexibly British,
he declared money, and also the art of getting money, to be hereditary
virtues, deserving of their reward. The reward a superior wealth and its
fruits? Yes, the power to enjoy and spread enjoyment: and let idleness
envy both! He abused idleness, and by implication the dilettante
insurgency fostering it. However, he was compensatingly heterodox in his
view of the Law's persecution of women; their pertinacious harpings on
the theme had brought him to that; and in consideration of the fact,
as they looked from yacht to shore, of their being rebels participating
largely in the pleasures of the tyrant's court, they allowed him to
silence them, and forgave him.

Thoughts upon money and idleness were in confusion with Diana. She had
a household to support in London, and she was not working; she could
not touch THE CANTATRICE while Emma was near. Possibly, she again
ejac