that she read rapidly, 'a
great deal at one gulp,' and thought in flashes--a way with the makers of
phrases. She wrote, she confessed, laboriously. The desire to prune,
compress, overcharge, was a torment to the nervous woman writing under a
sharp necessity for payment. Her songs were shot off on the impulsion;
prose was the heavy task. 'To be pointedly rational,' she said, 'is a
greater difficulty for me than a fine delirium.' She did not talk as if
it would have been so, he remarks. One is not astonished at her appearing
an 'actress' to the flat-minded. But the basis of her woman's nature was
pointed flame: In the fulness of her history we perceive nothing
histrionic. Capricious or enthusiastic in her youth, she never trifled
with feeling; and if she did so with some showy phrases and occasionally
proffered commonplaces in gilt, as she was much excited to do, her moods
of reflection were direct, always large and honest, universal as well as
feminine.

Her saying that 'A woman in the pillory restores the original bark of
brotherhood to mankind,' is no more than a cry of personal anguish. She
has golden apples in her apron. She says of life: 'When I fail to cherish
it in every fibre the fires within are waning,' and that drives like rain
to the roots. She says of the world, generously, if with tapering idea:
'From the point of vision of the angels, this ugly monster, only half out
of slime, must appear our one constant hero.' It can be read maliciously,
but abstain.

She says of Romance: 'The young who avoid that region escape the title of
Fool at the cost of a celestial crown.' Of Poetry: 'Those that have souls
meet their fellows there.'

But she would have us away with sentimentalism. Sentimental people, in
her phrase, 'fiddle harmonics on the strings of sensualism,' to the
delight of a world gaping for marvels of musical execution rather than
for music. For our world is all but a sensational world at present, in
maternal travail of a soberer, a braver, a brighter-eyed. Her reflections
are thus to be interpreted, it seems to me. She says, 'The vices of the
world's nobler half in this day are feminine.' We have to guard against
'half-conceptions of wisdom, hysterical goodness, an impatient
charity'--against the elementary state of the altruistic virtues,
distinguishable as the sickness and writhings of our egoism to cast its
first slough. Idea is there. The funny part of it is our finding it in
books of fiction com