IT is a very odd thing that with a father a novelist, who can sell ten thousand copies of a book, you can’t get any sort of useful advice on the subject he has made peculiarly his own. Ariadne would much sooner consult the cook about such things. And it is not nice to ask advice from a person who can oblige you to follow it! George can’t in fairness advise as an author and command as a father, so the result is that Ariadne makes blunders at all these parties she goes to now. Poor girl, she only has me to consult. I say it is a mistake the moment you enter a room to fix your eyes on the man you want to dance with you, or even to ask him for a dance as Ariadne did once. She said she thought he was too shy to ask her, though he did know her a little, and she wanted to see if he danced as beautifully as he looked. A man shy! It takes a shy girl like Ariadne to imagine that! For Ariadne is both shy and superstitious. She gets that from Lady Scilly and Lady Scilly’s aunt, the Countess of Plyndyn. A very fat old lady with a corresponding hand, that when she holds it out to a fortune-teller, it is like counting the creases in a feather-bed. She makes them take count of every crease though, and begs them to invent a fate for her.

“Haven’t I got a future like other people?” she whines, and then the poor paid fortune-teller, in a great hurry, sows a crop of initials in her hand, and she is not more than pleased, and takes it as a right to have three husbands, although she is already seventy.

Lady Scilly never thinks of having an afternoon-party now without at least two fortune-tellers in different parts of the house. You see people waiting in little lumps at the doors; in a little more, and they would be tying their handkerchiefs to the handles, just as you do to bathing-machines, to say who has the right to go in first. They go in shyly, just like people who have made a stumble in the street, looking silly, and they come out looking humble, like people who have been having their hair washed. The fortune-teller doesn’t tell women the very serious things, for instance, that they are going to die themselves, though she tells them when their husbands are. They always tell Ariadne what sort of coloured man she is going to marry, but as there are only two sorts of coloured men, fair and dark, it is sure to come right sometimes. The last time the woman said, “Fair—verging on red!” and as Ariadne doesn’t know any man who has anything like red hair except Mr. Aix, whom she doesn’t care for, she frowned and said, “Are you quite sure?” The woman changed it to dark, almost black, in a great hurry, and Ariadne was pleased, for it is a safer colour. Ariadne wears a piece of wood let into a bracelet that Lady Scilly gave her, just the same as she wears herself, and touches it whenever she thinks misfortune is in the air, or when she is afraid of making a fool of herself more than usual. She took me out to gather May dew in Kensington Gardens, and very smutty it was. She always counts cherry-stones, and once at the Islingtons’ lunch when it came badly, she actually swallowed Never!

Now, in Lady Scilly’s set, they call her “The girl that swallowed Never,” and it seems to amuse them. Anything amuses them, especially a nickname. I myself wonder Ariadne did not have appendicitis, or at least that apple-tree growing out of her ear they used to tell us of when we were children. At luncheon parties now, they make a joke of refusing to help her to greengage, cherry, or plum-tart, in fact to anything countable, and Ariadne doesn’t seem to see that it is plain to them all that she is anxious to be married, which, though it is true, sounds unpleasant, at any rate for the men. She is wild to be married, and to go away and leave this house and have a house of her own that she can ask me to come and stay at, and Miss Mander. I think it is a very good wish, only why make it public? Nor she needn’t let every one know that George only gives her fifteen pounds a year to dress like a lady on. It is cheaper to dress like an artist or a Bohemian, or in character, and so she does. We don’t have any dressmaker, we hardly know the feel of one even. Mother and Ariadne make their own clothes, and Mother never going out, is able to give Ariadne a little extra off her own allowance. I don’t know how much that is. She will never tell.

Mother has all the taste that Aunt Gerty hasn’t got. It is odd, how taste skips one in a family! Aunt Gerty is like a very smart rag-doll, dressed in odds and ends to show the fashion on a small scale. And fashion after all is only a matter of “bulge.” You bulge in a different place every year, and if you can only bulge a little earlier, or leave off bulging in any particular place sooner than other people, well, you may consider you are a well-dressed woman!

Ariadne makes money doing his reviews for George. He gives her sixpence a head, when he remembers to. Dozens of books come in to our house every week, from The Bittern, and for Wild Oats. George is “Pease Blossom” on The Bittern. We don’t need to subscribe to a library, we live in a book-shop practically, for they are all sold in Booksellers’ Row afterwards. George takes the important ones, of course, and gives the smaller fry to Ariadne to do. She is his understudy. When they are ready George writes hers up, and Christina types them, and it all goes in together. He once reviewed a batch of bad ones under the heading of Darnel, and people thought him clever but malicious.

Papa doesn’t know it, but Ariadne has an understudy too. She lets the novels out to me, and gives me twopence a head. I must say that she has no idea of beating one down. I read them as carefully as I have time for—it depends on how many Ariadne gives me—and then when she is doing her hair, I sit beside her, and tell her the plots. The more improper ones she keeps to herself, but I read those for pleasure, not work, so it’s all right.

Ariadne knows about a dozen useful phrases that she didn’t invent, but found ready made. “Up to the level of this author’s reputation” is one; “marks a distinct advance,” “breezy,” “strong, or convincing,” and the opposites, “unconvincing,” “weak,” “morbid,” “effete,” are useful ones. She uses all these turn and turn about, and always mentions “a fine sense of atmosphere” if she honestly can.

She has great fun sometimes, when she meets the authors in society. She flirts with them till they get confidential, and tell her about their books, and how totally they have been misunderstood by the press, and what a crassly ignorant set reviewers are! They explain to her that not one of the whole d—d crew has the slightest sense of responsibility, especially The Bittern, which has got the most God-forsaken staff that ever paper went to the devil with! Ariadne is amused at all this and gives them another chance of conversation, and then they go on to quote her own words to her!

Once, though, she got caught, and George very nearly took all the reviewing away from her, for he had to stand the racket himself, of course. She had actually said at the end of the review that it was a pity Mr. —— I forget the author’s name—did not relieve our anxiety as to the perpetrator of the hellish crime, which to the very end he allowed to remain shrouded in obscurity. Well, as a matter of fact, there was a hanging scene and dying confession in the last chapter but one, but Ariadne unfortunately burnt that before she had got to it. She was using the novel as a screen to keep the draught off the flame for heating her tongs, and so she never read that part, and had to make up her own end. The editor of The Bittern had to acknowledge the error and apologize in a footnote, because the author threatened a libel action. Ariadne doesn’t care about meeting that man in society!

It is fairer at any rate for Ariadne to review books than George, because she doesn’t write them. People who write books shouldn’t have the right to say what they think of other people’s; it is like a mother listening to tales in the nursery, and putting one child in the corner to please another. I once went into the study and saw George walking up and down, and throwing light bits of furniture about.

“D—m the fellow! He’s stolen the babe unborn of an excellent plot of mine, and mauled it and ruined it, beyond recognition!”

It was no use my putting in my word, and saying, “Well, then, George, you can use it again.” He went on fuming and fussing, loudly dictating a regular corker of a review.

“I’ll let him have it! Go on, please, Miss Mander. ‘The signal ineptitude of this author’s——’”

I am sure that was going to be a very unpleasant review to read, though I never saw it in print.

Ariadne is sentimental, and doesn’t care for realistic novels at all, which is a pity, as George’s greatest friend, and the person who comes oftenest to this house, is a realist, and wrote a novel called The Laundress. He lived in Shoreditch in a tenement dwelling for a whole year to learn how to write it from the laundresses themselves,—he went to tea with a different laundress every afternoon? The one he wrote about had three diamond rings and three husbands to match. He himself wore flannel shirts then, not nice frock-coats such as he has now, but the flannel shirts weren’t because he was poor, but so as not to frighten the laundresses by looking too smart. Then the book came out, and there was a great fuss about it, and it was published at sixpence, and our cook bought it, and it lies on the kitchen-table beside the cookery-book.

That is the reason Mr. Aix, being a realist, makes more money than Papa, who is an idealist. You see, Duchesses and Countesses want to hear all about laundresses, just as much as cooks do, but though Duchesses and Countesses are interested in mediÆval knights and maidens, cooks—nor yet laundresses—aren’t.

“The suburbs do not appreciate me as they do you, old man!” he says sometimes. “If I was proper, they wouldn’t even look at me!”

“Ay! the suburbs?” George says dreamily; “the kind, the mild, the tenderly trustful suburbs. I manipulate them freely. I have taught Peckham Rye and Clapham that there are stranger things in Pall Mall and Piccadilly than are dreamt of in their simple philosophy——”

“You have tickled the Philistines, not smitten them!” says Mr. Aix.

“I have shocked them—they love being shocked! I have startled them—that does them good. I have puzzled them—not altogether unpleasantly. I have inured them to Dukes and familiarized them with Duchesses, as the butcher hardens his pony to a motor-car. I reduce to a common, romantic denominator——”

“You are like those useful earthworms of le pÈre Darwin, bringing up soil and interweaving strata,” said Mr. Aix wearily.

George accepted the worm reluctantly, and went on. “Yes, I dominate the lower strata, they dote on any topsy-turvy upper-class gospel I chose at the moment to formulate for their crass benefit. Miss Mander, did you ever envisage Peckham?”

“I lived there and sold matches once,” said she, “and, moreover, I’ve kept a Home for distressed female-authors in the Isle of Dogs.”

“Is there anything you haven’t done?” said Mr. Aix, quite jealous of a woman interfering in his own line. He always makes a point of living among his raw material. When he was writing The Serio-Comic, in order to get the serious atmosphere—which I should have thought gin would have done for well enough—he went every night of his life to some music hall or other, and went behind and talked to them, and fastened their frocks at the back for them, and put in hair-pins when they stuck out just as they were going on. Then he stood them drinks, and didn’t preach for his life, for if he had, the serio-comics wouldn’t have told him anything or shown him the secret of their inner life. He had to pretend that he thought them and their life all that was perfect. Christina calls this novel “The Sweetmeat in the Gutter,” and loves it, though George says it is as broad as it’s long, and that ladies shouldn’t read it. But Christina has been to Klondike and seen the seamy side, so it doesn’t matter. I have read The Serio-Comic, and I can’t see anything wrong. There’s more seriousness than fun in it. Miss Deucie Dulcimer’s real name is Frances Raggles, and she’s the mother of five in the course of three hundred and fifty pages, and there’s a brandy-and-soda in every chapter.

Mr. Aix is forty, but he looks like a boy. He has a snub soft nose like Lady Scilly’s pug, with wrinkles on the bridge of it. He wears spectacles because of his weak eyes, and he always says “Quite so,” as if he were good-natured enough to agree with Providence in everything. He is the opposite of George, who is proud to be considered cat-like. Perhaps that is why they are friends. If Mr. Aix were a dog, he would knock over everything with his tail. He has no tact. He never drinks anything but water, and does calisthenics before breakfast with an exerciser on a door. He is the kind of man who would put stops in a telegram—so very punctilious. His eyes are wall, and look different ways, and Aunt Gerty says that once at a dance he asked two girls for the same polka, and they both accepted, because he looked at them both at the same time.

He is about the only person who doesn’t think Ariadne pretty, so Ariadne naturally dislikes him. She can’t help it. If we didn’t let her think she was pretty, she would have jaundice, or something lingering of that sort. She snubs Mr. Aix, but somehow he won’t consider himself snubbed. It comes of having no sense of decency, as the reviews say of him. Christina chaffs him, and teases him about his next novel, and asks him if it is to be called The Dustman or The General, and what the locale is to be, the scullery or the collecting-places just outside London?

I have an idea that it will be called The Seamstress, for he has lately taken to coming up into the little entresol on the stairs where we sit and stitch, and make our frocks, and asking us to teach him to sew. He puts out a hand like a sheaf of bananas, Ariadne fits a needle into one of them, and he cobbles away quite painstakingly for an hour.

Once he came up when Ariadne was awfully tired, and could hardly keep her eyes open, as she always is after a dance.

“I have often wondered,” he began, “what must be the sensations of a young girl on entering on her kingdom of the ball-room. Is she dazzled, is she obfuscated by the twinkling repetition of the lights? are her senses stunned or stimulated by the ponderous beat of the time, relentless under its top-dressing of melody, like despair underlying frivolity? Is she——?”

He would have gone on for ever if I had not interrupted—

“I can tell you. She’s thinking all the time, ‘Is there a hair-pin sticking out? Is the tip of my nose shiny? Is my dress too short in front, and is it properly fastened at the back, and what does Mr. —— it depends which Mister is there that evening—think of it all?”

“Don’t, Tempe!” said Ariadne.

“No, no, Miss Tempe, go on, I beg of you. Go on being indiscreet. Tell me some more things about women.”

“Do you know why women always sit on one side when they are alone in a hansom?”

“No, I have no idea. Some charmingly morbid reason, I suppose?”

“Oh, you can call it morbid, if you like,” I said. “It is only because there happens to be a looking-glass there.”

George and Mr. Aix have different publishers, but the same literary agent. A publisher once took them both to the top of a high hill in Surrey and tempted them—to sell him the rights of every novel they did for ten years, and be kept in luxury by him. But they both shook their heads and said, “You must go to Middleman!” Then he took them to a London restaurant and made them drunk, and still they shook their heads and sent him to Middleman, who makes all their bargains for them, but he can’t control all the reviews.

One morning Mr. Aix came in to see George, with a blue press-cutting in his hand; I was in the study then, as it happened, and I did not go. George never minds our hearing everything, he says it is too much of an effort to be a hero to one’s typewriter, or one’s daughter.

“I am in a rage!” Mr. Aix said, and so I suppose he was, though he looked more like a white gooseberry than ever. “Just let me get hold of this fellow they have got on The Bittern, and see if I don’t wring his neck for him!”

George didn’t say anything, and so I asked—somebody had to—“What has The Bittern man done, please?”

“Done! He has dammed me with faint praise, that’s all! I’d have the fellow know that I’m read in every pothouse, every kitchen in England! Here, George, take it, and read it, the infamous thing!”

George read it—at least he ran his eyes over it. He didn’t seem to want to see it particularly, and gave it back as if it bit him, saying—

“Well, my dear fellow, you must take the rough with the smooth—one can always learn something from criticism, or so I find!”

“What the devil do you suppose I am to learn from an incompetent paste-and-scissors understrapper like that? He wants a good hiding, that’s what he wants, and I for one would have no objection to giving it him!”

“Well, it wasn’t me wrote it, Mr. Aix,” I said, “nor Ariadne!” He isn’t supposed to know that George farms out his reviews.

Mr. Aix laughed, and left off being cross. The odd thing was, that it had only just missed being Ariadne or me, for the book certainly came in for review. Most likely George wrote it, or else why didn’t he trouble to read it, when it was given him to read? It looks as if he were growing a little tiny bit of a conscience, for he knows he ought to have said to The Bittern editor, “Avaunt! Don’t tempt an author to review his friend’s book, when he knows he cannot speak well of it for so many reasons!” That is my idea of literary morality.