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 She seemed to have withdrawn from the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.

Diana smoothed her wrists, compressing her lips not to laugh at the
simulation of an attitude of combat. She took up her pen.

And strange to think, she could have flowed away at once on the stuff
that Danvers delighted to read!--wicked princes, rogue noblemen, titled
wantons, daisy and lily innocents, traitorous marriages, murders, a
gallows dangling a corpse dotted by a moon, and a woman bowed beneath.
She could have written, with the certainty that in the upper and the
middle as well as in the lower classes of the country, there would be
a multitude to read that stuff, so cordially, despite the gaps between
them, are they one in their literary tastes. And why should they not
read it? Her present mood was a craving for excitement; for incident,
wild action, the primitive machinery of our species;