"Well, I can't exactly decide," says I; "strange things do happen in that direction. I have heard of young women marrying literary men who never wrote a line worth reading before, who burst out into full-blown geniuses right in the honeymoon. But it is wonderful how much their style was like their husbands'. Of course, those must be cases of especial affinity. When a woman has ransacked a poor fellow's heart, she naturally begins to pillage his brain, and I reckon he must like it at first; but after that, he subsides into himself, and she subsides into herself, and somehow she writes just as she did before, and so does he!"
"Then there are plenty of young ladies who carry their ambition and their flirtations in among the newspaper people and stray Bohemians," says E. E., kindling up to the subject; "for every time they get into a new flirtation, which is once in about three months, their style changes, giving them a wonderful versatility of talent that, somehow, dies out after awhile, as she grows old and homely."
"That is," says Dempster, laughing, "every time a literary lady of this stamp changes her lover, she changes her style, too."
"Exactly," answers E. E., "and where she hasn't any good-natured lover she retires into modest privacy till one comes along."
I just listened, holding my breath.
"What," says I, "does fraud and deception creep into the sacred literature of our country? I cannot believe it."
"Can't you?" says E. E.; "but you have never been in Bohemia."
"No," says I, "that is a part of Europe that I hope to visit, but never have. Is it a popular place for Americans?"
"Oh, wonderfully popular, for people who dash off things here and there, write for this and that, and are willing to give half that they earn and know to any adventurer that comes along, free gratis for nothing; or, on occasion, sell reputation by the line, and for a price. Oh, Bohemia is a splendid place for adventurers and adventuresses to forage in!"
"What!" says I, "genius sell itself?"