The Celebrity at Home. Violet Hunt

      “I don’t see why you should permit yourself to abuse my set because you’re a fifth cousin. That’s the worst of being well connected, so many people think they have the right to lecture one!”

      “All the better for you, my dear! Do you suppose now, that if you were not niece to a duke and cousin to a marquis, that Society would allow you to fill your house with people like Morrell Aix and Mrs. Ptomaine and Ve——”

      Lady Scilly jumped up and said she must go and dress, and if he wouldn’t come to the lecture he must go, and pushed me out of the room in front of her and on up-stairs.

      “Good-bye!” she called to him over the bannisters. “Let yourself out, and don’t steal the spoons.”

      That was a funny thing to say to a friend, not to say a relation! We went up into her bedroom, and her old nurse—I suppose it was her nurse, for she wore no cap and bullied her like anything—came forward.

      “Put me into another gown, Miller!” she said, flopping into a chair. Miller did, putting the skirt over her head as if she had been a child, and even pulling her stockings up for her. Then she had a try at tidying me.

      “Don’t bother. The child’s all right. She’s so pretty she can wear anything.”

      I think personal remarks rude even if she does think me pretty, but I said nothing. She looked at herself very hard in the glass, and we went down-stairs and got into the motor again. Lady Scilly sat with her hand in mine, and a funny little spot of red on the top of the bone of her cheek that I hadn’t noticed there before. It was real.

CHAPTER IV

       Table of Contents

      WE went into a house and into a large empty room with whole streets of coggley chairs and a kind of pulpit thing in the middle. A jug of water and a tumbler stood on it. There was a governessy-looking person present, presiding over this emptiness, whom Lady Scilly immediately began to order about. She was the secretary of the club, and Lady Scilly is a member of the committee.

      “Where will you sit, Lady Scilly?” said this person, and she asked a good many other questions, using Lady Scilly’s name very often.

      “I shall sit quite at the back this time,” Lady Scilly answered. “Too many friends immediately near him might put the lecturer out!” As she said this she looked at me wickedly, but I could not think why.

      We then went away and read the comic papers for a little until the place had filled. In the reading-room we met a gentleman, who seemed to be a great friend of Lady Scilly’s. He spoke to me while she was discussing some arrangement or other with the secretary, who had followed her.

      “How do you like going about with a fairy?” he asked me.

      “I’m not,” I said. “She’s a grown-up woman, old enough to know——”

      “Worse!” he interrupted me. “She is what I call a fairy!”

      “What is a fairy?” I asked, though he seemed to me very silly, and only trying to make conversation.

      “A fairy is a person who always does exactly as she likes—and as other people sometimes don’t like.”

      “I see,” I said, as usual, although I did not see, as usual, “just as grown-up people do.”

      “But she isn’t pretty when she is old! I wonder if you will grow up a fairy? No, I think not, you don’t look as if you could tell a lie.”

      “I beg your pardon,” I said. He then remarked that Lady Scilly had sent him to take me into the room where the lecture was to be given, and we went. Of course I politely tried to let age go first, but he didn’t like that, and said “Jeunesse oblige,” and “Place aux dames,” and “Juniores ad priores”—every language under the sun, winding up with that silly old story about the polite Lord Stair, who was too polite to hang back and keep the king waiting.

      “Oh yes, I know that story,” I said, just to prevent him going on bothering. “It’s in Ollendorff.”

      The lecture-room was quite full, and we—Lady Scilly and I—squeezed ourselves in at the back in a kind of cosy corner there was, and we were almost in the dark.

      “Sit tight, child, whatever happens!” she kept saying, and held my hand as if I should run away. When among a rain of claps the lecturer came in I saw why, for it was George!

      Lady Scilly grabbed my arm, and said, “Don’t call out, child!”

      As if I was going to! But now I saw why she had kept calling him the lecturer instead of saying his name whenever she had spoken of him before. Now I saw why she was so full of nods and winks and grins, and had brought me to the lecture so particularly. Now I saw why the old gentleman had called her a fairy—that meant a tease, and I wasn’t going to gratify her by seeming upset or anything. Not I! So I sat quite still as she told me, and George began.

      I borrowed a pencil of the Ollendorff man, and put down some notes to remind me of what George said, for Ariadne. It took me some time to get used to the funny little voice George put on to lecture with, quite different to his Isleworth voice. Presently when I began to catch on a little I found that the lecture was all about novels and the good of them, as Lady Scilly had said. This is the sort of thing—

      “A novel,” said my father, “is apt to hold a group of quite ordinary, uninteresting characters, wallowing in their clammy, stale environment, like fishes in an aquarium, held together by a thin thread of narrative, and bounded by the four walls of the author’s experience. His duty is to enlarge that experience, for to novels we go, not so much for amusement as for a criticism of Life. That portion of life which comes under the reader’s own observation is naturally so restricted, so vastly disproportionate, to the whole great arcana.” (I do hope I got this down right!) “The novelist should be omniscient and omnipotent.” (Once I got these two great words, all the rest seemed child’s play.) “A great responsibility lies with the purveyors of this necessary panorama of existence, the men who monopolize the furnishing and regulating of the supply.” (Loud applause.) “The right man, or peradventure, the right woman” (he bowed at Lady Scilly), “knows, or ought to know, so many sides, while the reader, alas, knows but one, and is so tired of that one!”

      Everybody sighed and groaned a little to show how tired they were, and George went on—

      “I see my audience is in touch with me. It works both ways.” (What works both ways? I must have left something out.) “A Duchess of my acquaintance said some poignant, pregnant words—as indeed all her words are pregnant and poignant” (he bowed to an old corpulent lady in another part of the room)—“to me the other day. She said that her novel of predilection was not a society novel. ‘I know it all, don’t I, like the palm of my hand?’ she objected. ‘I know how to behave in a drawing-room and how not to behave in a boudoir!’ So she complained. The substance of her complaint, as I understand it, is this;—what she wants is worlds not realized! She wants to see the actress in her drawing-room, the flower-girl in her garret, the laundress at her tub, the burglar at his work——”

      Here George made a little bob at Mr. Aix in the audience, for there he was, and there was another fit of clapping. Then he went on—

      “I mean to say that what we mostly seek in fiction is to be taken out of our own lives, and put into somebody else’s—to temporarily change our moral environment. High life is deeply interested in what is going on below stairs. Bill Sykes and ‘Liza of Lambeth, if they have any time for reading, want to know all about countesses and their attendant sprites.” (Fancy calling Simon Hermyre that!) “The Highest or the Lowest, but no middle course, is the novelist’s counsel of perfection. There is no second class in the literary railway.

      “Yet