Page:Robins - Way Stations.djvu/25

 the man's game, and seeing how nearly like him she can do it. So conscious is she it is his game she is trying her hand at, that she is prone to borrow his very name to set upon her title-page. She does so, not only that she may get courage from it to talk deep and go a-swashbuckling now and then, but for the purpose of reassuring the man. Here is something quite in your line, she implies; for lo! my name is " George."

Her instinct for the mask is abundantly justified.

No view is more widely accepted than that every woman's book is but a naïve attempt to extend her own little personality.

We do not commonly find the man-made hero confounded with the author. When a man takes some small section of the arc of a character or a dramatic situation, and (capable of intellectual honesty, and precisely of leaving himself out of the Saga) if he follows the curve so rigidly that he describes the complete circle, his faithful projection of the illusion of life is rewarded by his critics' saying: "What a power of imagination the fellow has!"

If a woman but attempts this honourable task——an affair of strong self-control and of almost mathematical accuracy—if she happens to bring it off, her critics pat her on the back with an absentminded air, while they look about for "personal experience."

Or they do not even look about. They are content to say: "This is so like the real thing it must