n't
give them jobs in the same way. Young men possessed the earth; young
women had to wrest what they wanted out of it piecemeal. Johnny might end
a cabinet minister, a notorious journalist, a Labour leader, anything....
Women's jobs were, as a rule, so dowdy and unimportant. Jane was bored to
death with this sex business; it wasn't fair. But Jane was determined to
live it down. She wouldn't be put off with second-rate jobs; she wouldn't
be dowdy and unimportant, like her mother and the other fools; she would
have the best that was going.

3

The family dined. At one end of the table was Mr. Potter; a small,
bird-like person, of no presence; you had not thought he was so great
a man as Potter of the Potter Press. For it was a great press; though
not so great as the Northcliffe Press, for it did not produce anything
so good as the _Times_ or so bad as the _Weekly Dispatch_; it was more
of a piece.

Both commonplace and common was Mr. Percy Potter (according to some
standards), but clever, with immense patience, a saving sense of humour,
and that imaginative vision without which no newspaper owner, financier,
general, politician, poet, or criminal can be great. He was, in fact,
greater than the twins would ever be, because he was not at odds with his
material: he found such stuff as his dreams were made of ready to his
hand, in the great heart of the public--the last place where the twins
would have thought of looking.

So did his wife. She was pink-faced and not ill-looking, with the cold
blue eyes and rather set mouth possessed (inexplicably) by many writers
of fiction. If I have conveyed the impression that Leila Yorke was in
the lowest division of this class, I have done her less than justice;
quite a number of novelists were worse. This was not much satisfaction
to her children. Jane said, 'If you do that sort of thing at all, you
might as well make a job of it, and sell a million copies. I'd rather
be Mrs. Barclay or Ethel Dell or Charles Garvice or Gene Stratton
Porter or Ruby Ayres than mother. Mother's merely commonplace; she's
not even a by-word--quite. I admire dad more. Dad anyhow gets there.
His stuff sells.'

Mrs. Potter's novels, as a matter of fact, sold quite creditably. They
were pleasant to many, readable by more, and quite unmarred by any
spark of cleverness, flash of wit, or morbid taint of philosophy.
Gently and unsurprisingly she wrote of life and love as she believed
these two things to be