ys remain. She is
economically independent because men cannot do without her. She has
more rights than the Imogenes will gain in a thousand years; and she
is, moreover, something that men would strive to preserve in a
world-cataclysm, whereas no one would give Imogene a single panic
thought.

Imogene, however, has no inkling of this. She is under the impression
that she is one of the world's cosmic forces. In the rag-bag of
her brain whence she fishes out the innumerable formless and
gaudy-coloured pilferings from which she fashions her "special
articles," she cherishes an extraordinary illusion that she is a sort
of modern Hypatia. She says Aspasia, but that is only because she has
confused Kingsley's heroine with Pericles' mistress. She talks of
"mating with an affinity" of "influencing the lives of the men who do
things." She is very worried about the men who do things. It is a
proof of her conventional and Victorian mentality that she imagines
men who do things are inspired to do them by women; whereas it is
rather the other way round, the men who do things having to avoid the
majority of women as they would _cholera morbus_, if they are ever to
get anything done.

Springing up on the impulse of this thought the author makes his
excuses to the assembled guests and descends the dark stairway to the
street. To tell the truth, these glimpses into the society of literary
folk do not inspire in his bosom any frantic anxiety to abandon his
own way of life. He had a furtive and foolish notion that these
people are of no importance whatever. These coteries, these at-homes,
and flat philosophies are not the real thing. It sounds unsocial and
unconventional, no doubt, but it is a question so far unsettled in the
author's mind whether any genuine artist loves his fellows well enough
to co-habit with them on a literary basis. For some mysterious reason
the real men, the original living forces in literature, do not
frequent the _salons_ of the Imogenes. They are more likely to
be found in the private bars of taverns in the King's Road, or
walking along lonely roads in Essex and Surrey. Indeed, they may be
preoccupied with problems quite foreign to the immediate business of
literary conversation. They may be building bridges, or sailing ships,
or governing principalities. They are unrecognised for the most part.
The fact is they are romantic, and it is the hall-mark of the true
romantic to do what other men dream of, and say n