We may be happy. Say, stern preacher, why
Should we then hate to live, or fear to die,
With Love for Time, Heaven for Eternity?
Rose perused them attentively, sighed deeply, and then resumed—
“Yes, he liked them, and said (I remember his very words) there was more vigour and purpose about them than in the general run of girlish verses. How could I find out whether they are worth anything?” She paused in reflection, then clasping her hands together suddenly, she exclaimed—
“Yes, of course, Mr. Frere; he was so good and kind about the pictures, and Lewis says he is so very clever, he will tell me. But may not he think it strange and odd in me to write to him? Had I better consult mamma?”
But with the question came an instinctive consciousness that she was about the last person whom it would be agreeable to consult on such an occasion. Rose, like every other woman possessing the slightest approach to the artist mind, felt a shrinking delicacy in regard to what the Browning school would term her “utterances,” which rendered the idea of showing them where they would not be appreciated exquisitely painful to her. Now, Mrs. Arundel had a disagreeable knack of occasionally brushing against a feeling so rudely as to cause the unlucky originator thereof to experience a mental twinge closely akin to the bodily sensation yclept toothache.
It will therefore be no matter of surprise to the reader to learn that Rose, after mature deliberation, resolved to keep the fact of her having applied to Mr. Frere a secret, at all events till such time as the result should become known to her.
She accordingly selected such of her poetical effusions as she deemed most worthy, in the course of which process she stumbled upon a short prose sketch, the only thing of the sort she had ever attempted, it being, in fact, a lively account of her first appearance at a dinner-party, written for the benefit of a young lady friend, but for some reason never sent. This, after looking at a page or two, she was about to condemn as nonsense, when an idea came across her that if Mr. Frere was to form a just estimate of her powers, it was scarcely fair to select only the best things; so she popped in the sketch of the dinner-party as a kind of destitution test, to show how badly she could write.
Then came the most difficult part of the business—the letter to Frere. True, she had written to him before, acting as her father’s amanuensis, but that was a different sort of thing altogether. Still, it must be done, and Rose was not a person to be deterred by difficulties; so she took a sheet of paper and wrote “Sir” at the top of it, and having done so, sat and looked at it till she became intensely dissatisfied. “Sir”—it seemed so cold and uncomfortable; so she took a second sheet and wrote, “Dear Sir.” Yes! that was better, decidedly. She only hoped it was not too familiar in writing to a young man; but then, Mr. Frere was not exactly a young man; he was a great deal older than Lewis; above thirty most likely; and three or four-and-thirty was quite middle-aged; so the “Dear Sir” was allowed to remain.