The Champagne Standard

The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Champagne Standard, by Mrs. John Lane
LONDON: JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY MDCCCCV
Copyright, 1905 , By John Lane Company
The Plimpton Press Norwood Mass. U.S.A.
TO THE PUBLISHER MY GENIAL AND SUGGESTIVE CRITIC
I was sitting alone with a lead-pencil, having a tête-à-tête with a sheet of paper. A brisk fire burned on the hearth, and through the beating of the rain against the little, curved Georgian windows I could hear the monotonous roll of the sea at the foot of the narrow street, and the tear and crunching of the pebbles down the shingle as the waves receded.
I had been ordered to write a preface to explain the liberty I had taken in making miscellaneous observations about two great nations, and then putting a climax to my effrontery by having them printed. So here I was trying, with the aid of a lead-pencil and a sheet of paper, to construct a preface, and that without the ghost of an idea how to begin. Nor was the dim electric light illuminating; nor, in the narrow street, the nasal invocation of an aged man with a green shade over his eyes, arm in arm with an aged woman keenly alive to pennies, somewhere out of whose interiors there emanated a song to the words, Glowry, glowry, hallaluh!
In fact, all the ideas that did occur to me were miles away from a preface. It was maddening! I even demanded that the ocean should stop making such a horrid noise, if only for five minutes. And that set me idly to thinking what would happen to the world if the tides should really be struck motionless even for that short space of time. The idea is so out of my line that it is quite at the service of any distressed romancer, dashed with science, who, also, may be nibbling his pencil.
I sat steeped in that profound melancholy familiar to authors who are required to say something and who have nothing to say. Finally, in a despair which is familiar to such as have seen the first act of Faust , I invoked that Supernatural Power who comes with a red light and bestows inspiration.