ce our
own public, infatuated as it may be with the theatre, refuses all
commerce--though indeed this can't but be, without cynicism, very much
through the infirmity the piece, IF printed, would reveal--so the
same horror seems to attach to any typographic hint of the proscribed
playbook or any insidious plea for it. The immense oddity resides in
the almost exclusively typographic order of the offence. An English, an
American Gyp would typographically offend, and that would be the end
of her. THERE gloomed at me my warning, as well as shone at me my
provocation, in respect to the example of this delightful writer. I
might emulate her, since I presumptuously would, but dishonour would
await me if, proposing to treat the different faces of my subject in the
most completely instituted colloquial form, I should evoke the figure
and affirm the presence of participants by the repeated and prefixed
name rather than by the recurrent and affixed "said he" and "said she."
All I have space to go into here--much as the funny fact I refer to
might seem to invite us to dance hand in hand round it--is that I was at
any rate duly admonished, that I took my measures accordingly, and
that the manner in which I took them has lived again for me ever so
arrestingly, so amusingly, on re-examination of the book.

But that I did, positively and seriously--ah so seriously!--emulate
the levity of Gyp and, by the same token, of that hardiest of flowers
fostered in her school, M. Henri Lavedan, is a contribution to the
history of "The Awkward Age" that I shall obviously have had to brace
myself in order to make. Vivid enough to me the expression of face of
any kindest of critics, even, moved to declare that he would never in
the least have suspected it. Let me say at once, in extenuation of the
too respectful distance at which I may thus have appeared to follow my
model, that my first care HAD to be the covering of my tracks--lest I
truly should be caught in the act of arranging, of organising dialogue
to "speak for itself." What I now see to have happened is that I
organised and arranged but too well--too well, I mean, for any betrayal
of the Gyp taint, however faded and feeble. The trouble appears to have
been that while I on the one hand exorcised the baleful association, I
succeeded in rousing on nobody's part a sense of any other association
whatever, or of my having cast myself into any conceivable or calculable
form. My private inspiration