Page:Marie Corelli - the writer and the woman (IA mariecorelliwrit00coat).pdf/371



A visitor is soon quite at ease. Formality is dispensed with. The keynote in Miss Corelli's house is Sincerity. She is a brilliant conversationalist, but a good listener too. She talks freely and without conscious effort, and one's faith in her is speedily inspired. What does she talk about? Just enough about herself to make her auditor wish for more; yet, with a condescension that is all grace, she is eager to hear all that her visitor has to say on the subjects nearest his own heart. Particularly does she like the theme to be the old loved authors, and whatever one has to tell of Dickens, or Thackeray, or Tennyson—and even if one should have a theory about Shakespeare—in Miss Corelli he will find not only the ardent listener but a woman whose quick and well-stored mind enables her to take up readily a debatable point, to help to resolve some doubt or mystery, or to add profitably to one's own stock of knowledge. No one can converse with her for an hour and come away unenriched.

Yes, she not only writes enchantingly, but she herself enchants. In her presence you are under a spell. "There's witchcraft in it." Her youth and her artlessness disarm you—you are left wondering how this fair young creature could have fought her way alone in the world (her life has been a battle), how she could have conquered opposition, and how she could have attained to her present supremacy. It may verge upon extravagance to say it, but there is something to marvel at in the fact that at an age long before that at which George Eliot had written her first story Miss Corelli had given us a dozen remarkable and original romances of world-wide fame, and there is no guessing what achievements yet lie before her and what position she may gain. Her powers are waxing rather than waning, and a month or two ago when the last two chapters of "Temporal Power" were in her hand,