  IT is last period on a long, sleepy, particularly humdrum day at school. Shirley sits trying to concentrate on a history text-book, but her mind will wander, despite her really noble efforts to distinguish the Valerian Laws from the Licinian Laws. “What an idiotic law to have to make!” she mutters resentfully. “But I’m sure I shouldn’t be so dumb in History if I had an interesting text-book. It seems as though someone could write it, even if we aren’t all Van Loons and H. G. Wellses. I bet I could myself—at least I’d make it a fascinating book if not a strictly exact one (‘Yes you would,’ says her Subconscious, but she pays no attention)! When I think of the generations of defenseless students to be subjected to these text-books, my heart aches for them!... The Valerian Law was....” The scene changes from this lethargic one to a fireside on a winter evening. She drops the book in her lap, the yells of the savages are fainter. She shakes the salt spray from her chair and tries to adjust herself once more to the prosaic of a land-lubber. “To write a book like that is my only desire on earth,” she murmurs, as she reaches for a volume of Jane Austen. Now, completely involved in the career of Emma, she says, “Oh, for that gift of the gods Jane Austen had! Her speech—a rippling stream of perfect and delicious English, the King’s English indeed! Each phrase is as delicately constructed as a watch, and all her watches tick together as one.” Thus the incorrigible child goes on, unaware how many fascinating books she has longed to have written. From Nicholas Nickleby to Thunder on the Left, from Walter H. Page to the Constant Nymph, and from Chaucer to Edna St. Vincent Millay! A veritable gourmande, she is. But forgive her. Who has not felt that he might improve a text-book? Who has not longed, in reading a glorious book, for similar brilliance? What lover of books is unmoved to an occasional effort at emulation, even if he afterwards destroy it? You who do these things, sympathize with Shirley, who, by her own hand we do confess, is bitterly disillusioned every time she tries to write a theme. |
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