Page:Marie Corelli - the writer and the woman (IA mariecorelliwrit00coat).pdf/352

 in her lecture at Edinburgh on "The Vanishing Gift," she thinks Imagination is a decaying faculty in the present day. "People seem unable to project themselves into either the past or the future," she says, "and yet that is the only way to gauge the events of the present."

Marie Corelli is a fair linguist, having a thorough knowledge of French and Italian. She can read Balzac and Dante as readily as she can read Walter Scott—these three, by the way, being particular favorites of hers.

Marlowe describes a library as containing "infinite riches in a little room." Though no millionaire in her possession of this kind of wealth, Marie Corelli has gathered about her a set of volumes which is representative without being cumbersome. Her books are not stored in a stately room that is held sacred to them and them alone, but they are here, there, and everywhere, in drawing-room, working-den, and bedroom. She is not a bookish woman—in the reading sense—but she reads discreetly, and has many widely different friends between covers. Nor is she a miser in this respect, for she gives and lends as readily as she buys or borrows.

Many of those interested in the novelist's movements have wondered what attraction drew Miss