hand
before--and then it was all about the oddest, yet the most commonplace
people. It seemed to her amazingly unreal--how these people spoke and
behaved--she had never known anyone like them; and yet again so true,
in the way it dragged in everyday happenings, so petty in its rendering
of petty things, that it bewildered and repelled her: why, some one
might just as well write a book about Mother or Sarah! Her young,
romantic soul rose in arms against this, its first bluff contact with
realism, against such a dispiriting sobriety of outlook. Something
within her wanted to cry out in protest as she read--for read she did,
on three successive days, with an interest she could not explain. And
that was not all. It was worse that the people in this book--the
extraordinary person who was married, and had children, and yet ate
biscuits out of a bag and said she didn't; the man who called her his
lark and his squirrel--as if any man ever did call his wife such
names!--all these people seemed eternally to be meaning something
different from what they said; something that was for ever eluding her.
It was most irritating.-- There was, moreover, no mention of a doll's
house in the whole three acts.

The state of confusion this booklet left her in, she allayed with a
little old brown leather volume of Longfellow. And HYPERION was so much
more to her liking that she even ventured to borrow it from its place
on the shelf, in order to read it at her leisure, braving the chance
that her loan, were it discovered, might be counted against her as a
theft.

It hung together, no doubt, with the after-effects of her dip into
Ibsen that, on her sitting down to write the work that was to form her
passport to the Society, her mind should incline to the most romantic
of romantic themes. Not altogether, though: Laura's taste, such as it
was, for literature had, like all young people's, a mighty bias towards
those books which turned their backs on reality: she sought not truth,
but the miracle. However, though she had thus taken sides, there was
still a yawning gap to be bridged between her ready acceptance of the
honourable invitation, and the composition of a masterpiece. Thanks to
her wonted inability to project her thoughts beyond the moment, she had
been so unthinking of possible failure that Cupid had found it
necessary to interject: "Here, I say, don't blow!" Whereas, when she
came to write, she sat with her pen poised over the paper for