That was what was the matter with the tempers of both of them this same evening when the carpenters had driven them into the cribbed study and then wasted time in carping at them.
On top of the book-case was the pile of finished matter. The ninth and tenth chapters of Phyl’s serial were there—“The Master of Malbrook Court.” There were quotations at the head of both chapters, a couple from Browning, one from Tennyson. The prose too was broken up in several parts with verses; when the heroine, for instance, went to the piano and sang For Ever and For Ever—the words of all the verses were given, and never did the hero grow agitated or impassioned, but he flung a few lines of Whitman or Heine, or whatever last poet the authoress had been reading, at the head of the person to whom he was speaking.
There was also Dolly’s serial, likewise full of quotations and similar in style, except that she did not attempt to work out the intricate plots in which Phyl revelled, but occupied herself chiefly in piling as much pathos as she could possibly manage upon every page.
Then there was Dolly’s children’s page ready, and [248] ]for this she generally let pathos alone, and scribbled off in half-an-hour a little tale, in which occasionally Freddie’s latest prank or some of their own home fun figured. Then there were poems, two each, signed either with the nom-de-plumes of “Fleur-de-lis” or “Wild Hyacinth,” “Robert Bernard Wycherly” or “Rupert Grey.”
Dolly delighted in such forms as the Villanelle, the Rondeau redouble, the dainty Triolet, and Phyl wrote in the strain of a still more diluted Lewis Morris.
“It’s your month to do the Home Article,” Phyl said, looking up from her own more congenial task of a paper on the blind poet, Philip Bourke Marston.
“I know,” groaned Dolly.
“And you’ll really have to be more careful this time,” the elder editor said. “Alice Ellerton told me her mother laughed like anything at your ‘How to Furnish a Girl’s Sitting-room for Three Pounds.’”
“Laughed!” said the writer anxiously, “why there wasn’t anything wrong.”
“Yes, there was,—you said, ‘First operate upon your inartistic walls, which I dare say are covered with some ugly wall-paper. Now nothing is easier than to enamel them all over with a delicate hedge-sparrow green.’”