, how
infinite the service! And did it not seem as though Providence had
blessed her with this special opportunity, sending Mr Alf to her just
at the one moment at which she might introduce the subject of her
novel without seeming premeditation?

'I am so tired,' she said, affecting to throw herself back as though
stretching her arms out for ease.

'I hope I am not adding to your fatigue,' said Mr Alf. 'Oh dear no. It
is not the fatigue of the moment, but of the last six months. Just as
you knocked at the door, I had finished the novel at which I have been
working, oh, with such diligence!'

'Oh;--a novel! When is it to appear, Lady Carbury?'

'You must ask Leadham and Loiter that question. I have done my part of
the work. I suppose you never wrote a novel, Mr Alf?'

'I? Oh dear no; I never write anything.'

'I have sometimes wondered whether I have hated or loved it the most.
One becomes so absorbed in one's plot and one's characters! One loves
the loveable so intensely, and hates with such fixed aversion those
who are intended to be hated. When the mind is attuned to it, one is
tempted to think that it is all so good. One cries at one's own
pathos, laughs at one's own humour, and is lost in admiration at one's
own sagacity and knowledge.'

'How very nice!'

'But then there comes the reversed picture, the other side of the
coin. On a sudden everything becomes flat, tedious, and unnatural. The
heroine who was yesterday alive with the celestial spark is found
to-day to be a lump of motionless clay. The dialogue that was so cheery
on the first perusal is utterly uninteresting at a second reading.
Yesterday I was sure that there was my monument,' and she put her hand
upon the manuscript; 'to-day I feel it to be only too heavy for a
gravestone!'

'One's judgement about one's self always does vacillate,' said Mr Alf
in a tone as phlegmatic as were the words.

'And yet it is so important that one should be able to judge correctly
of one's own work! I can at any rate trust myself to be honest, which
is more perhaps than can be said of all the critics.'

'Dishonesty is not the general fault of the critics, Lady Carbury,--at
least not as far as I have observed the business. It is incapacity. In
what little I have done in the matter, that is the sin which I have
striven to conquer. When we want shoes we go to a professed shoemaker;
but for criticism we have certainly not gone to professed critics. I
think that when