Project Gutenberg's A Modern Chronicle, Volume 6, by Winston Churchill

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net

Title: A Modern Chronicle, Volume 6

Author: Winston Churchill

Release Date: October 19, 2004 [EBook #5379]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A MODERN CHRONICLE, VOLUME 6 ***

Produced by David Widger

A MODERN CHRONICLE

By Winston Churchill

Volume 6.

CHAPTER VI

CLIO, OR THALIA?

According to the ordinary and inaccurate method of measuring time, a
fortnight may have gone by since the event last narrated, and Honora had
tasted at last the joys of authorship. Her name was not to appear, to be
sure, on the cover of the Life and Letters of General Angus Chiltern; nor
indeed, so far, had she written so much as a chapter or a page of a work
intended to inspire young and old with the virtues of citizenship. At
present the biography was in the crucial constructive stage. Should the
letters be put in one volume, and the life in another? or should the
letters be inserted in the text of the life? or could not there be a
third and judicious mixture of both of these methods? Honora's counsel on
this and other problems was, it seems, invaluable. Her own table was
fairly littered with biographies more or less famous which had been
fetched from the library, and the method of each considered.

Even as Mr. Garrick would never have been taken for an actor in his coach
and four, so our heroine did not in the least resemble George Eliot, for
instance, as she sat before her mirror at high noon with Monsieur Cadron
and her maid Mathilde in worshipful attendance. Some of the ladies,
indeed, who have left us those chatty memoirs of the days before the
guillotine, she might have been likened to. Monsieur Cadron was an
artist, and his branch of art was hair-dressing. It was by his own wish
he was here to-day, since he had conceived a new coiffure especially
adapted, he declared, to the type of Madame Spence. Behold him declaring
ecstatically that seldom in his experience had he had such hairs to work
with.

"Avec une telle chevelure, l'on peut tout faire, madame. Etre simple,
c'est le comble de l'art. Ca vous donne," he added