y in her autobiography, but in
its seventeenth chapter.

I had not gone very much further in that same chapter before I was
caught in the following thicket:

"I have got china, books, whips, knives, matchboxes, and clocks given me
since I was a small child."

If these things were given her since she was a small child, they might
have been given her on the day she wrote--in which case it would not
have been remarkable that she still possessed them. The nearest way out
of the jungle would be to substitute "when" for "since." But it is
incredible that she should have thought of two ways of saying the same
thing, let them run into one another, and sent "The Sunday Times" the
mess resulting from the collision.

She must be right. Mr. Balfour said she was the best letter-writer he
knew. With generous reciprocity she read Mr. Balfour's books and
realized without external help "what a beautiful style he wrote."

And for goodness sake don't ask me how you write a style. You do it in
precisely the same way that you cook a saucepan--that is, by the
omission of the word "in."

Yet one more quotation from the last column of the last extract:

"If I had to confess and expose one opinion of myself which might
differentiate me a little from other people, I should say it was my
power of love coupled with my power of criticism."

No, never mind. The power of love is not an opinion; and in ending a
sentence it is just as well to remember how you began it. But I
absolutely refuse to let my simple faith be shaken. She records the
bones that she has broken, but John Addington Symonds told her that she
retained "_l'oreille juste_." Her husband said she wrote well, and he
must know. Besides, am I to be convinced in my penultimate chapter that
anything can be wrong with the model I have followed? Certainly not. It
would be heartbreaking.

Besides, the explanation is quite simple. When she wrote that last
instalment in "The Sunday Times," the power of criticism had gone to
have the valves ground in.

I will now ask your kind attention for my estimate of me, Marge
Askinforit, by myself.

There is just one quality which I claim to have in an even greater
degree than my prototype. She is unlike real life--no woman was ever
like what any woman supposes herself to be--but I am far more unlike
real life. I have more inconsistency, more self-contradiction, more
anachronism, more impossibility. In fact, I sometimes feel as if some
fool of