I am sure that was going to be a very unpleasant review to read, though I never saw it in print.
Ariadne is sentimental, and doesn’t care for realistic novels at all, which is a pity, as George’s greatest friend, and the person who comes oftenest to this house, is a realist, and wrote a novel called The Laundress. He lived in Shoreditch in a tenement dwelling for a whole year to learn how to write it from the laundresses themselves,—he went to tea with a different laundress every afternoon? The one he wrote about had three diamond rings and three husbands to match. He himself wore flannel shirts then, not nice frock-coats such as he has now, but the flannel shirts weren’t because he was poor, but so as not to frighten the laundresses by looking too smart. Then the book came out, and there was a great fuss about it, and it was published at sixpence, and our cook bought it, and it lies on the kitchen-table beside the cookery-book.
That is the reason Mr. Aix, being a realist, makes more money than Papa, who is an idealist. You see, Duchesses and Countesses want to hear all about laundresses, just as much as cooks do, but though Duchesses and Countesses are interested in mediæval knights and maidens, cooks—nor yet laundresses—aren’t.
“The suburbs do not appreciate me as they do you, old man!” he says sometimes. “If I was proper, they wouldn’t even look at me!”
“Ay! the suburbs?” George says dreamily; “the kind, the mild, the tenderly trustful suburbs. I manipulate them freely. I have taught Peckham Rye and Clapham that there are stranger things in Pall Mall and Piccadilly than are dreamt of in their simple philosophy——”
“You have tickled the Philistines, not smitten them!” says Mr. Aix.
“I have shocked them—they love being shocked! I have startled them—that does them good. I have puzzled them—not altogether unpleasantly. I have inured them to Dukes and familiarized them with Duchesses, as the butcher hardens his pony to a motor-car. I reduce to a common, romantic denominator——”
“You are like those useful earthworms of le père Darwin, bringing up soil and interweaving strata,” said Mr. Aix wearily.
George accepted the worm reluctantly, and went on. “Yes, I dominate the lower strata, they dote on any topsy-turvy upper-class gospel I chose at the moment to formulate for their crass benefit. Miss Mander, did you ever envisage Peckham?”
“I lived there and sold matches once,” said she, “and, moreover, I’ve kept a Home for distressed female-authors in the Isle of Dogs.”