arp quotes him further as declaring "without her there would
have been no 'Fiona Macleod.'" Perhaps; but I doubt if, after the Celtic
Renaissance had won a hearing, anything could have prevented Sharp from
following what was, after all, a natural bent. I am not going to argue
the matter out, but he himself admitted that his development as "Fiona
Macleod" began "while I was still a child," and there is proof in almost
every volume he published, even before he knew Mrs. Rinder ("E.W.R.,"
must of course be the author of "The Shadow of Arvor"), that his
tendency was toward what became characteristic of "Fiona Macleod."

It was the love that Sharp had for all sorts of "psychic things," the
mysterious, the unaccountable, the hidden, that led him to believe that
"without her there would have been no 'Fiona Macleod.'" Sharp himself,
when his "other self," with sense of humor alert, was more than willing
to admit that it is easy to believe what one wishes to believe; and he
delighted to tell a story at the expense of Mr. Yeats illustrative of
the trite fact. Sharp went one day, in London, to call on Mr. Yeats.
When lunch-time came, they set about cooking eggs. Mr. Yeats held them
in a frying-pan over the little fire in the grate. As they slipped
about, Mr. Yeats, all the while looking back in the room away from the
fire as he talked to Sharp, allowed the pan to tip too far and the eggs
fell out into the fire. So absorbed was he in the topic of conversation,
most appropriately the disappearance of material things, that he did
not notice the catastrophe or the quick disappearance of the eggs among
the coals. When his perfervidness subsided for a moment, he turned to
see if they were done. "There, what did I tell you!" said he; "our talk
of these things has conjured up the powers and the eggs are gone." Sharp
did not tell him of the accident. And there were no more eggs in the
room to have for lunch.

One of the reasons that led William Sharp to write "Silence Farm" (1899)
was to have something under his own name that might be very different
from the stories of "Fiona Macleod." And "Silence Farm" is very
different, a story without the distinguishing qualities of "Pharais" or
"The Divine Adventure," and suggesting kinship to the work of his other
self only through certain likenesses of domestic irregularity in the
family of Archibald Ruthven to other domestic irregularity in the family
of Torcall Cameron of "The Mountain Lovers." Th