[p 240]
“I am very glad to have met you, Miss Clare,”—I said—“I hope we shall be friends!”
“There is no reason why we should be enemies I think,” she responded frankly—“I am very pleased you came to-day. If ever you want to ‘slate’ me again, you know your fate!—you become a dove,—nothing more! Good-bye!”
She saluted us prettily as we passed out, and when the gate had closed behind us we heard the deep and joyous baying of the great dog ‘Emperor,’ evidently released from ‘durance vile’ immediately on our departure. We walked on for some time in silence, and it was not till we had re-entered the grounds of Willowsmere, and were making our way to the drive where the carriage which was to take us to the station already awaited us, that Lucio said—
“Well; now, what do you think of her?”
“She is as unlike the accepted ideal of the female novelist as she can well be,” I answered, with a laugh.
“Accepted ideals are generally mistaken ones,”—he observed, watching me narrowly—“An accepted ideal of Divinity in some church pictures is an old man’s face set in a triangle. The accepted ideal of the devil is a nondescript creature, with horns, hoofs (one of them cloven) and a tail, as Miss Clare just now remarked. The accepted ideal of beauty is the Venus de Medicis,—whereas your Lady Sibyl entirely transcends that much over-rated statue. The accepted ideal of a poet is Apollo,—he was a god,—and no poet in the flesh ever approaches the god-like! And the accepted ideal of the female novelist, is an elderly, dowdy, spectacled, frowsy fright,—Mavis Clare does not fulfil this description, yet she is the author of ‘Differences.’ Now McWhing, who thrashes her continually in all the papers he can command, is elderly, ugly, spectacled and frowsy,—and he is the author of—nothing! Women-authors are invariably supposed to be hideous,—men-authors for the most part are hideous. But their hideousness is not noted or insisted upon,—whereas, no matter how good-looking women-writers may be, they still pass under press-comment as frights, [p 241] because the fiat of press-opinion considers they ought to be frights, even if they are not. A pretty authoress is an offence,—an incongruity,—a something that neither men nor women care about. Men don’t care about her, because being clever and independent, she does not often care about them,—women don’t care about her, because she has the effrontery to combine attractive looks with intelligence, and she makes an awkward rival to those who have only attractive looks without intelligence. So wags the world!—
O wild world!—circling through æons
untold,—
‘Mid fires of sunrise and sunset,—through flashes of silver and gold,—
Grain of dust in a storm,—atom of sand by the sea,—