"And yet I would not complain of mere discomfort," she continued, "if that were all. People who have to work for their living must not be too particular. What pains me most of all is the effect that this sort of work is having on myself. You would not believe--and I am almost ashamed to confess--how I am worried by small and mean jealousies and anxieties, and how I am tortured by the expression of opinions which, all the same, I hold in contempt. I reason with myself to no purpose. It ought to be no concern of mine if some girl in a burlesque makes the house roar, by the manner in which she walks up and down the stage smoking a cigar; and yet I feel angry at the audience for applauding such stuff, and I wince when I see her praised in the papers. Oh! these papers! I have been making minute inquiries of late; and I find that the usual way in these towns is to let the young literary aspirant who has just joined the office, or the clever compositor who has been promoted to the sub-editor's room, try his hand first of all at reviewing books, and then turn him on to dramatic and musical criticism! Occasionally a reporter, who has been round the police courts to get notes of the night charges, will drop into the theatre on his way to the office, and 'do a par.,' as they call it. Will you believe it possible that the things written of me by these persons--with their pretentious airs of criticism, and their gross ignorance cropping up at every point--have the power to vex and annoy me most terribly? I laugh at the time, but the phrase rankles in my memory all the same. One learned young man said of me the other day: 'It is really distressing to mark the want of unity in her artistic characterizations when one regards the natural advantages that nature has heaped upon her with no sparing hand.' The natural advantages that nature has heaped upon me! 'And perhaps, also,' he went on to say, 'Miss White would do well to pay some little more attention before venturing on pronouncing the classic names of Greece. Iphigenia herself would not have answered to her name if she had heard it pronounced with the accent on the fourth syllable.'" Macleod brought his fist down on the table with a bang. "If I had that fellow," said he, aloud--"if I had that fellow, I should like to spin for a shark off Dubh Artach lighthouse." And here a most unholy vision rose before him of a new sort of sport--a sailing launch going about six knots an hour, a goodly rope at the stern with a huge hook through the gill of the luckless critic, a swivel to make him spin, and then a few smart trips up and down by the side of the lonely Dubh Artach rocks, where Mr. Ewing and his companions occasionally find a few sharks coming up to the surface to stare at them.