“I’ve eyes. I”—she opened and shut her tiny hands before them—“I’ve claws. I can pry you open, any of you—if I choose. I haven’t chosen. You’ve not been worth while. But—Madala!” and here she released the uneasy Baxter girl—“Madala’s my chance—my chance—my chance! Madala Grey—look at her—coming into her kingdom at twenty—that babe! And me! Look at me! Do you know what my life has been, any of you? Oh, you come to my house to meet my lionets, and we’re very good friends, and you’re afraid of my reviews, and so I have my position, I suppose. But what do you know about me? When I was fifteen—and it’s thirty years ago—I said to myself, ‘Now what shall I do with my life?’ Mother—” she shot her a glance: she didn’t even trouble to lower her voice, “she’d have drudged me and dressed me and married me, I suppose, to three hundred a year and the city—oh, with the best of motives. I fought. I fought. That’s why I’m an ungrateful daughter. I’m supposed to be, I think. My people were so sorry for my mother. My people thought me a fool. I saw through them. Yes, and I saw through myself. That’s the kind of a fool I was. Didn’t I reckon it out? I hadn’t a charm. I hadn’t a talent. I had my _will_. That’s all I had. I taught myself. Work? You don’t know what work means, you ten and five-talented. There’s not a book worth reading that I haven’t read. There’s not the style of a master that I haven’t studied, that I couldn’t reproduce at a pinch. There’s not a man or a woman in London today, worth knowing—from my point of view—that I haven’t contrived to know. The people who’ve arrived—how I’ve studied them, the ways of them, the methods of them. And what’s the end of it all? That” —she jerked her head to the row of her own books on the shelf behind her—“and my column in the _Matins_, and some comforting hundreds a year, and—my knowledge of myself. Oh, I’ve turned out good work. I know that. I have judgment. That’s why I judge myself. I’ve always been rigid with myself. And so I know when I look at my books—though I can say that they are sounder, better work, in better English, that they have more knowledge behind them, than the books of a dozen of you people who arrive—yet I know that they have failed. People don’t read me. People don’t want me. Why? I have my name. I’ve the name of a well-known critic, but—I’m only a name. I’m not alive. The public doesn’t touch hands with me. Now why? Oh, how I’ve tormented myself. Nearly thirty years I’ve given, of unremitting labour, to my art, to my career. There’s not a thought or a wish that I haven’t sacrificed to it. And then that child of twenty comes along, without knowledge, without training, without experience, and gets at one leap, mark you all, at one leap, more than I’ve achieved in thirty years. Some people, I suppose, would submit. Well, I won’t. I wouldn’t. Does my will go for nothing? I _will_ have my share. ‘Reflected glory,’ yes, I’ve stooped to that. I’ve exploited her, if you like to call it that.