"Ah, well, all she wanted, all she was seeking, was sympathy."
"She should have waited until it came to her."
"But if it never came?"
"It would—if she had not been so eager and voracious. The truth is, Corinne was an inordinate egotist. She expected all minds to defer to her superiority, while at the very moment she was engaged in extracting from them any poor little knowledge or ideas they might possess which could serve her own purposes. All her books were talked into existence; she talked them before she wrote them. It was her custom, at the dinner-table here at Coppet, to introduce the subject upon which she was engaged, and all her guests were expected, indeed forced, to discuss it with her in all its bearings, to listen to all she herself had to say, and never to depart from the given line by the slightest digression until she gave the signal. The next morning, closeted in her own room, she wrote out the results of all this, and it became a chapter."
"She was a woman of genius, all the same," said Mrs. Winthrop, in a disagreeing tone.
"A woman of genius! And what is the very term but a stigma? No woman is so proclaimed by the great brazen tongue of the Public unless she has thrown away her birthright of womanly seclusion for the miserable mess of pottage called 'fame.'"
"The seclusion of a convent? or a prison?"
"Neither. Of a home."
"You perhaps commend obedience, also?"
"In one way—yes."