ossways? I have forgotten him.'

'He declared you was so beautiful a lady he would drive you to the end
of England for nothing.'

'It must have been when I was paying him. Put it out of your mind,
Danvers, that there are individual cabmen. They are the painted flowers
of our metropolitan thoroughfares, and we gather them in rows.'

'They have their feelings, ma'am.'

'Brandied feelings are not pathetic to me.'

'I like to think kindly of them,' Danvers remarked, in reproof of her
inhumanity; adding: 'They may overturn us!' at which Diana laughed. Her
eyes were drawn to a brawl of women and men in the street. 'Ah! that
miserable sight!' she cried. 'It is the everlasting nightmare of
London.'

Danvers humped, femininely injured by the notice of it. She wondered her
mistress should deign to.

Rolling on between the blind and darkened houses, Diana transferred her
sensations to them, and in a fit of the nerves imagined them beholding a
funeral convoy without followers.

They came in view of the domed cathedral, hearing, in a pause of the
wheels, the bell of the hour. 'Faster--faster! my dear man,' Diana
murmured, and they entered a small still square of many lighted windows.

'This must be where the morrow is manufactured,' she said. 'Tell the
man to wait.--Or rather it's the mirror of yesterday: we have to look
backward to see forward in life.'

She talked her cool philosophy to mask her excitement from herself. Her
card, marked: 'Imperative-two minutes,' was taken up to Mr. Tonans. They
ascended to the editorial ante-room. Doors opened and shut, hasty feet
traversed the corridors, a dull hum in dumbness told of mighty
business at work. Diana received the summons to the mighty head of the
establishment. Danvers was left to speculate. She heard the voice of Mr.
Tonans: 'Not more than two!' This was not a place for compliments. Men
passed her, hither and yonder, cursorily noticing the presence of a
woman. She lost, very strangely to her, the sense of her sex and became
an object--a disregarded object. Things of more importance were about.
Her feminine self-esteem was troubled; all idea of attractiveness
expired. Here was manifestly a spot where women had dropped from the
secondary to the cancelled stage of their extraordinary career in a
world either blowing them aloft like soap-bubbles or quietly shelving
them as supernumeraries. A gentleman--sweet vision!--shot by to the
editor's door, without even looking curs