The Celebrity at Home. Violet Hunt

transport ourselves in seven-league boots to the better quarters of London, to visualize the giddy cultured throng in the halls of Belgravia, and set down accurately the facile inaccuracies of the small talk of Mayfair. It is the tale of the mad, bad great world that sets the heart of the matron of Kennington Common aflame, and makes her waking dreams ‘all a wonder and a wild desire.’ Que voulez vous? She is our staple standing reader. She does not want to bend her chaste thoughts towards Hornsey Rise and Cricklewood, to envisage, stimulated by the novelist’s art, its bursten boilers, its infant woes, its humdrum marrying and giving in marriage. No, she prefers, in her grey unlovely Jerry-built parlour, to gloat over the morbid, rose-coloured sins that are enacted in the halls of fashion; the voluptuous sorrows of the Bridge-end of the week; the mystery of Royal visits postponed are her chosen pabulum. To all these novelists whose ways are cast in safe and humdrum middle-class places I would say that they had best ignore their entourage as a help to local colour. In this case, character drawing, like charity, should not begin at Home. Go out, go out, young man, from thy homely nest in the suburbs, where the females of thy family hang over their flaccid meat teas in faded blouses——”

      I think it was about here that I half got up, quite determined, and Lady Scilly pinched me in several places at once.

      “Don’t nip me, please,” I said. “I think somebody ought to get up and tell George he’s drivelling, and if nobody else does, I will.”

      “Bless the child!” she said. “You may answer him when he’s done, if you like, and can. It will be quite amusing.”

      I think that she really was a fairy, but never mind! I did think somebody ought to stop George, and take Mother’s side. So I waited, though I stopped my ears and would not listen to any more till George sat down and the secretary lady asked if some one would care to answer Mr. Vero-Taylor’s speech? Lady Scilly poked me up, and I got up so that George and all of them could see me, and I didn’t feel a bit shy—no, for I had something to say, and off I went, to speak up for Mother who wasn’t there to speak up for herself.

      “Ladies and Gentlemen,” I said—I noticed that George began like that—“I don’t agree at all with what the gentleman—who is my father—has been saying about Tooting—Upper Tooting, I mean. He ought to be more patriotic, as he lives at Isleworth, which is pretty nearly the same thing, part of his time anyhow, and I suppose he needn’t do it unless he likes. And as for what he says about Mother, why, I can tell everybody that Mother doesn’t read novels about Duchesses or anybody. She hasn’t time, she’s much too busy in the house, bringing us up, and cooking specially for George, and so on. That’s all!”

      I sat down with a bump. George seemed to subside, and I lost him, but I hardly expected him to come and hug me. Lady Scilly went and comforted him, perhaps! I don’t know what happened, except tea and coffee, but I didn’t feel inclined, and I asked Mr. Aix to take me home.

      He did, in a hansom. He held my hand all the way. We didn’t talk, but I am sure he wasn’t cross with me, and held my hand to show it. He seemed to know I was going to have a bad time.

      I did. Even Mother scolded me.

      Papa didn’t come near us for a week, and when he was due I asked if I might have a cold and be in bed. God sent me a real cold to make me truthful. Aunt Gerty nursed me. It wasn’t so bad. She read to me about Thumbelina and Boadicea, my two favourite heroines, one big and the other little, and poetry about my painted boy, which I love and that always makes me go to sleep. I believe it is spelt with a u, and doesn’t mean a child at all. But, I like it best my way—