ence which followed was one of those which Mark had felt it
due to himself to interpolate. This was but one example, said the
inexorable critic, there were other instances more flagrant still--and
in all of these the astonished Mark recognised his own improvements!

To say that this was for the moment an exceedingly unpleasant shock to
his self-satisfaction is to state a sufficiently obvious fact; but
Mark's character must have been very imperfectly indicated if it
surprises anyone to hear that it did not take him long to recover from
the blow.

Perhaps he had been wrong in grafting his own strong individuality on
an entirely foreign trunk--he had not been careful enough to harmonise
the two styles--it was merely an odd coincidence that the reviewer,
struck naturally enough by the disparity, should have pitched upon
_him_ as the offender. By-and-by he grew to believe it a positive
compliment that the reviewer (no doubt a dull person) had simply
singled out for disapproval all the passages which were out of his
depth--if there had been nothing remarkable about them, they would not
have been noticed at all.

And so, as it is a remarkable peculiarity in the mind of man, that it
can frequently be set at ease by some self-constructed theory which
would not bear its own examination for a minute--as if a quack were to
treat himself with his own bread-pills and feel better--Mark, having
convinced himself that the reviewer was a crass fool whose praise and
blame were to be read conversely, found the wound to his self-love
begin to heal from that moment.

That same Saturday afternoon Mabel was sitting in the little room at
the back of the house, in which she received her own particular
friends, wrote her letters, and read; just then she was engaged in the
latter occupation, for the books had come in from the library that
day, and she had sat down after luncheon to skim them through before
selecting any which seemed worth more careful reading.

* * * * *

Mabel had grown to be fastidious in the matter of fiction, the natural
result of a sense of humour combined with an instinctive appreciation
of style. There had been a time of course, when, released from the
strict censorship of a boarding-school under which all novels on the
very lengthy _index expurgatorius_ had to be read in delicious
stealth, she had devoured eagerly any literature which was in bright
covers and three volumes--but that ti