"How do you mean to get new impressions? Are you going to stay here?" Utterly's voice now disparaged Waltonville.
"I had not thought of going away," said Eleanor. "I have just graduated to-day and I haven't any particular plans."
"You and your mother are alone?"
"Yes."
"Couldn't you have a winter in New York?"
"I had thought that sometime I might go to Boston," said Eleanor.
Utterly sniffed the air. He had, he said, little opinion of Boston as an experience. Boston was of the past. No one got experience of anything but the past there, and the past one ought to try to get away from.
"A writer must have stimulation," he went on. "A woman's talent is, in far greater degree than a man's, dependent upon outside influences; it is far less self-nourished and self-originated; she must have life, though not too much life, and she must hold herself in a measure separate from it."
Utterly added to this sage prescription a "don't you know," and Eleanor answered with a hesitating "yes." She was, in spite of her confusion, a little amused. Utterly had come half a day too late; had he presented himself last evening instead of this, he might have made a deeper impression.
Presently he ceased to ask questions and began to orate. In this audience he found none of the stupid dullness which he had observed in Dr. Scott, none of the silent unresponsiveness of Dr. Lister. All that he would have said yesterday to his fellow travelers if they had had minds to understand, all that he would have said to-day to Dr. Lister and Dr. Scott, if they had had ears to hear, all that he would have said at any time to any one who would listen, he said now. He discussed schools of writing, ancient and modern; he discussed the influence of Shelley upon the young Browning, the place of Edgar Allan Poe in American literature and in English literature as a whole, and finally, the ethics of biographical writing. The heat with which he spoke upon the last topic was the sudden bursting into flame of the embers which had smoldered since the afternoon. Had the world a right to all it could learn of the lives of geniuses, or had it not? It most assuredly had, declared Utterly. An author's acts in the world, an artist's, a musician's, were as much the property of the world as they were the property of the recording angel—if modern theology had not banished that person from modern life. He spoke of the invaluable revelations of old letters, which proved so clearly that no matter how long the world believed that writers evolved from their inner consciousness the material of their work, in the end it was proved to have a foundation in actual experience. Time and scholarly investigation were showing what was long suspected and long denied, that Charlotte Brontë's own life had furnished her with her "stuff."