Page:O Genteel Lady! (1926).pdf/117

 'If women are patient and self-sacrificing they find love, wealth, and happiness. They always do in your stories, you know. Do they in life?'

'I think,' she said with an abominable smugness, 'we usually get what we deserve in this world, no—not always.' She recalled Eliza Hornblower, a good, gentle creature blessed with all the virtues and cursed with a wretched complexion. In stories, when you call girls 'plain' you are never specific. If Eliza had been wicked, unchaste, would she have been more cruelly punished? Mamma was the happiest person she had ever known. She humbly asked the oracle, 'Shouldn't a story be better than life, in a way truer?'

'Should it?'

'Teach a lesson?'

'Shouldn't it? One has to work these things out for one's self. You haven't read or lived very widely yet.'

'Mr. Trelawney wants me to try Gautier and George Sand, but I've always heard the French masters are so sadly immoral.'

'Well, if you want always to write for "H. and H.," keep away from them. Keep on rolling sugar-coated moral lessons for ladies of delicate digestive tracts, intellectually speaking.'

The girl thought guiltily of the dreadful books she had read with furtive eagerness at the Athenæum, all about witchcraft. Of course, not even the wicked French could possibly be as bad as that, but then why tell all one knows? She went on sharpening pencils