TO FAY COMPTON

My dear Fay.

For several reasons I am anxious to inscribe this book to you. Unless somehow or other I safeguard you publicly, you are liable to be accused by gossip of having written it, an accusation that both you and I might be justified in resenting. Many people suppose that you wrote an earlier novel of mine called Carnival, which, were it true, would make you out to be considerably older than you are, since I take it that even your precocity, though it did run to marriage at the age of seventeen (or was it sixteen?), would hardly have allowed you to write Carnival at the same age. One day, if Mr. Matheson Lang will allow me to use my own title—at present he is using it for a play that he and somebody else have adapted from an Italian original—you may act the part of Jenny Pearl; but that is as near as you will ever get to her creation. Then lately a young gentleman wrote to ask me if I would inform him whether the generally accepted theory that you had written the first two chapters of Sinister Street had any existence in fact. So you see, I do not exaggerate when I say that you are liable to be credited with The Vanity Girl. Equally I should not like gossip to pretend that the heroine if not drawn by you was certainly drawn from you; and though any friend of yours or mine would laugh at such a suggestion, it is just as well to kill the cacklers before they lay their eggs. But the chief reason for inscribing this book to you is my desire to record, however inadequately, what pleasure and pride, dear Fay, your charm, your talents, your beauty, and success have given to

Your affectionate brother,     
Compton Mackenzie.

Capri, August 4, 1919.