n
small circle she had made herself ridiculous. Her mother took those
cruel reviews to heart, and wept over them. The Duke, a coarse-minded
man, at best, with a soul hardly above guano and chemical composts,
laughed aloud at his poor little girl's failure.

"It's a sad disappointment, I daresay," he said, "but never mind, my
pet, you'll do better next time, I've no doubt. Or if you don't, it
doesn't much matter. Other people have fancied themselves poets, and
have been deceived, before to-day."

"Those horrid reviewers don't understand her poetry," protested the
Duchess, who would have been hard pushed to comprehend it herself, but
who thought it was a critic's business to understand everything.

"I'm afraid I have written above their heads," Lady Mabel said
piteously.

Roderick Vawdrey was worst of all.

"Didn't I tell you 'The Sceptic Soul' was too fine for ordinary
intellects, Mab?" he said. "You lost yourself in an ocean of obscurity.
You knew what you meant, but there's no man alive who could follow you.
You ought to have remembered Voltaire's definition of a metaphysical
discussion, a conversation in which the man who is talked to doesn't
understand the man who talks, and the man who talks doesn't understand
himself. You must take a simpler subject and use plainer English if you
want to please the multitude."

Mabel had told her lover before that she did not aspire to please the
multitude, that she would have esteemed such cheap and tawdry success a
humiliating failure. It was almost better not to be read at all than to
be appreciated only by the average Mudie subscriber. But she would have
liked someone to read her poems. She would have liked critics to praise
and understand her. She would have liked to have her own small world of
admirers, an esoteric few, the salt of the earth, literary Essenes,
holding themselves apart from the vulgar herd. It was dreadful to find
herself on a height as lonely as one of those plateaux in the Tyrolean
Alps where the cattle crop a scanty herbage in summer, and where the
Ice King reigns alone through the long winter.

"You are mistaken, Roderick," Mabel said with chilling dignity; "I have
friends who can understand and admire my poetry, incomprehensible and
uninteresting as it may be to you."

"Dear Mabel, I never said it was uninteresting," Roderick cried humbly;
"everything you do must be interesting to me. But I frankly own I do
not understand your verses as clearly