“The piece I brought with me is very strong. You were always best at tragedy, and I have frequently said that you are the only woman in London who can speak blank verse,” were the words that I heard spoken by the third literary gentleman at the further side of a group of palms on a pedestal.
I thought it better not to say anything about my having a play concealed about my person. It occurred to me that it might be well to withhold my good news for a day or two. Meantime I had a delightful chat with the lady journalist, and confided in her my belief that some of the literary men present had not come for the sake of the intellectual treat available at every reception of our hostess’s, but solely to try and palm off on her some rubbish in the way of a play.
She replied that she could scarcely believe that any man could be so base, and that she feared I was something of a cynic.
When she was bidding good-bye to our hostess I distinctly heard the latter say,—
“I am sorry that you have only made it in two acts; however, you may depend on my reading it carefully, and doing what I can with it for you.”
The above story might be looked on as telling against myself in some measure, so I hasten to obviate its effect by mentioning that the play which I had in my pocket was acted by the accomplished lady for whom I designed it, and that it occupied a dignified place among the failures of the year.
There was a lady journalist—at least a lady so describing herself—who sent me long accounts of the picture shows three days after I had received the telegraphed accounts from the art correspondent employed by the newspaper. She wanted to get a start, she said; and it was in vain that I tried to point out to her that it was the other writers who got the start of her, and that so long as she allowed this to happen she could not expect anything that she wrote to be inserted.
It so happened, however, that her art criticisms were about on a level with those that a child might pass upon a procession of animals to or from a Noah’s Ark. Then the lady forwarded me criticisms of books that had not been sent to me for review, and afterwards an interview or two with unknown poets. Nothing that she wrote was worth the space it would have occupied.
Only last year I learned with sincere pleasure that this energetic lady had obtained a permanent place on the staff of a lady’s halfpenny weekly paper. I could not help wondering on what department she could have been allowed to work, and made some inquiry on the subject. Then it was I learned that she had been appointed superintendent of the health columns. It seems that the readers of this paper are sanguine enough to expect to get medical advice of the highest order in respect of their ailments for the comparatively trilling expenditure of one halfpenny weekly. By forwarding a coupon to show that they have not been mean enough to try and shirk payment of the legitimate fee, they are entitled to obtain in the health columns a complete reply as to the treatment of whatever symptoms they may describe. As this reply is seldom printed in the health columns until more than a month or six weeks after the coupon has been sent in to the newspaper, addressed “M.D.,” the extent of the boon that it confers upon the suffering—the long-suffering—subscribers can easily be estimated.