'I'm sure I don't know, ma'am. I'm romantic.'
'And you think me a romantic object?'
'I'm sure I can't say, ma'am. I'd rather serve you than any other lady; and I wish you was happy.'
'Do you suppose I am unhappy?'
'I'm sure—but if I may speak, ma'am: so handsome and clever a lady! and young! I can't bear to see it.'
'Tush, you silly woman. You read your melting tales, and imagine. I must go and write for money: it is my profession. And I haven't an idea in my head. This news disturbs me. Ruin if I don't write; so I must.—I can't!'
Diana beheld the ruin. She clasped the great news for succour. Great indeed: and known but to her of all the outer world. She was ahead of all—ahead of Mr. Tonans!
The visionary figure of Mr. Tonans petrified by the great news, drinking it, and confessing her ahead of him in the race for secrets, arose toweringly. She had not ever seen the Editor in his den at midnight. With the rumble of his machinery about him, and fresh matter arriving and flying into the printing-press, it must be like being in the very furnace-hissing of Events: an Olympian Council held in Vulcan's smithy. Consider the bringing to the Jove there news of such magnitude as to stupefy him! He, too, who had admonished her rather sneeringly for staleness in her information. But this news, great though it was, and throbbing like a heart plucked out of a breathing body, throbbed but for a brief term, a day or two; after which, great though it was, immense, it relapsed into a common organ, a possession of the multitude, merely historically curious.
'You are not afraid of the streets at night?' Diana said to her maid, as they were going upstairs.
'Not when we're driving, ma'am,' was the answer.