which it is at last powerless to escape, the resemblance to a prig in
fiction is sometimes more than fanciful. It is real. For there is no
doubt that prigs have a horrid family likeness to each other, whether in
books or in real life. I have sometimes felt as the puzzled mother of
some long-lost Tichborne might feel. Each claimant to the estates in
turn seems to acquire a look of the original because he _is_ a claimant.
Has not this one my lost Willy's eyes? But no! that one has Willy's
hands. True, but the last-comer snuffles exactly as my lost Willy
snuffled. How many men have begun suddenly and indubitably in my eyes to
resemble one of the adored prigs of my novels, merely because they
insisted on the likeness themselves.

The most obnoxious accident which has yet befallen me, the most wanton
blow below the belt which Fate has ever dealt me, is buried beneath the
snows of twenty years. But even now I cannot recall it without a
shudder. And if a carping critic ventures to point out that blows below
the belt are not often buried beneath snow, then all I can say is that
when I have made my meaning clear, I see no reason for a servile
conformity to academic rules of composition.

I was writing "Diana Tempest." One of the characters, a very worldly
religious young female prig, was much in my mind. I know many such. I
may as well mention here that I do not bless the hour on which I first
saw the light. I have not found life an ardent feast of tumultuous joy.
But I do realise that it has been embellished by the acquaintance of a
larger number of delightful prigs than falls to the lot of most. I have
much to be thankful for. Having got hold of the character of this lady,
I piloted her through courtship and marriage. I gleefully invented _all_
her sayings on these momentous occasions, and described the wedding and
the abhorrent bridegroom with great minuteness. In short, I gloated over
it.

The book was finished, sold, finally corrected, and in the press when
one of the young women who had unconsciously contributed a trait to the
character became affianced. She immediately began throwing off with
great dignity, as if by clock-work, all the best things which I had
evolved out of my own brain and had put into the mouth of my female
prig. At first I was delighted with my own cleverness, but gradually I
became more and more uneasy, and when I attended the wedding my heart
failed me altogether. In "Diana Tempest" I had describ