the day when she should
write beautiful books, poems, romances. These Aunt Eliza classed roughly
as "stuff and nonsense"; and one day, when she found Kitty reading the
_Girls' Very Own Friend_, she tore that harmless little weekly across
and across and flung it into the fire. Then she faced Kitty with flushed
face and angry eyes.

"If I ever catch you bringing such rubbish into the house again,
I'll--I'll stop your music lessons."

This was a horrible threat. Kitty went twice a week to the Guildhall
School of Music. She had no musical talent whatever, but the journey to
London and back was her one glimpse of the world's tide that flowed
outside the neat, gloomy, ordered house at Streatham. Therefore Kitty
was careful that Aunt Eliza should not again "catch her bringing such
rubbish into the house." But she went on reading the paper all the same,
just as she went on writing her little stories. And presently she got
one of her little stories typewritten, and sent it to the _Girls' Very
Own Friend_. It was a silly little story--the heroine was _svelte_, I
am sorry to say, and had red-gold hair and a soft, _trainante_
voice--and the hero was a "frank-looking young Englishman, with a
bronzed face and honest blue eyes." The plot was that with which I
firmly believe every career of fiction begins--the girl who throws over
her lover because he has jilted her friend. Then she finds out that it
was not her lover, but his brother or cousin. We have all written this
story in our time, and Kitty wrote it much worse than many, but not
nearly so badly as most of us.

And the _Girls' Very Own Friend_ accepted the story and printed it, and
in its columns notified to "George Thompson" that the price, a whole
guinea, was lying idle at the office till he should send his address.
For, of course, Kitty had taken a man's name for her pen-name, and
almost equally, of course, had called herself "George." George Sand
began it, and it is a fashion which young authors seem quite unable to
keep themselves from following.

Kitty longed to tell some one of her success--to ask admiration and
advice; but Aunt Eliza was more severe and less approachable than usual
that week. She was busy writing letters. She had always a sheaf of
dull-looking letters to answer, so Kitty could only tell Mary in the
kitchen under vows of secrecy, and Mary in the kitchen only said: "Well,
to be sure, Miss, it's beautiful! I suppose you wrote the story down out
of some