She took my two hands in both of hers.
"I couldn't dream of permitting you to sulk with me, little Marguerite. I've known you since the days when you wore a pinafore and had to be slapped for washing some snails in the best toilet ware in my spare room before throwing them to the ducks—nasty child. It seems hard to discourage you, to talk to you thus, but whatever in the name of fortune has put such a dreadful idea into your head?"
"Do you think it so dreadful?"
"Terribly dreadful!" she returned. "I knew an authoress—I beg her pardon, I mean an author—who after a small success with her first book—nasty, miry sort of book it was too—left her husband, quite a decent man as men go, with red hair and freckles (they lived in the country), and went to London to see life as she called it, which meant sitting on the top of a penny omnibus and eating rolls and butter at an A.B.C. She wore her hair à la Sarah Bernhardt, and expected to have an intrigue, which never came off, the lady being past forty and plain at that. When her second edition money—I think it got into a second edition—was finished she was very glad and thankful to creep back to her husband, who in a big, magnanimous way took her in, which I wouldn't have done. Then I knew another author—successful fifth edition this was—whose head became so swelled that some cows in a field—she was lying in a ditch composing—took it for a mangel-wurzel one day and ate it."
"Do you expect me to laugh here?" I asked.
"Not at all," she reassured me. "I only want to impress you before it is too late. I have one more case. A poor girl wrote a book called Awakenings, or some such title. A reviewer on an ultra-superior, provincial paper, the Damchester Guardian I think it was, cut it to pieces with the cleverness, cruelty and ruthlessness of extreme youth. The critic must have been young, for only youth is really hard. There was not a good word for it; it was described as maudlin, sentimental twaddle. The girl—she was a fool of course, but we can't all be born clever—committed suicide. This was a bit of rare good luck for her publisher, for he got an advertisement for nothing, and sold forty thousand copies of the book in three months."
Nanty paused for breath. John, the coachman, looked respectfully ahead and pretended he didn't mind waiting; and I called her attention to our bank of crocuses.
"Don't like crocuses," she said.
I laughed.
"Still obstinate?"