The Press-notices, in fact, from which these six extracts are taken, were a huge lark, and one day I found my father (who so far from summoning family councils on the subject never spoke to me about my public scribblings at all) wide-eyed and absorbed in one of these contemporary revilings. Suddenly he threw his head back with a great shout of laughter, and slapped me on the back. “You’ve got broad enough shoulders to stand that sort of thing,” he said. “Come along, are the horses ready?” and out we went riding. But less humorous were certain private kicks which I got (and no doubt deserved) from less ludicrous antagonists. Of these the chief, and the most respected both then and now, must be nameless. He had been so hot in appreciation and so cordial over _Dodo_, politely observing in it a “high moral beauty” that I find him (in this same forgotten box) writing to me, before the appearance of _The Rubicon_, in these words à propos of the growing public taste for realism: “The public in the next generation will be what you and one or two others like you choose to make it. Good work in any style gives that style vogue.... It’s ever when you are most serious you are at your best. Work, work and live.” Well, I worked and lived like the devil for strenuousness. Then _The Rubicon_ made its appearance, and the same friend took a blistering pen instead: “If anything could possibly give a more serious blow to your chances of future and legitimate success than the publication of _The Rubicon_, it would be to bring out within three or four years another novel.... It does not seem to me that you have formed the slightest conception of the true situation. It is this. Your first book, from accidental and even parasitic causes--things that were not in the book at all--enjoyed an entirely abnormal and baseless success. You have now to begin again, and for several years the public will certainly not listen to you as a novelist.” For the life of me, I cannot now, reading these explosive records over again, determine whether I could have gained anything by paying the smallest attention to them. Logically, it was impossible to do so, for they clearly were directed, as I have said, not against this wretched old _Rubicon_, but against the person who had dared to capture success with _Dodo_. Rightly or wrongly, it seemed to me that vituperation so violent could not be regarded as other than comic. If I was a nursery-governess and a man-milliner, and a gentleman’s gentleman it was all very sad, but I was less overwhelmed because I was already terribly interested in the _Babe, B.A._ and not at all interested in the _St. James’s Budget_, except as a humorous publication, which the _Babe, B.A._ tried to be, too. And then there were delightful plans ahead; this autumn Maggie was to come out to Athens with me, and we were to go on to Egypt together, and have a Tremendous Time.... CHAPTER XIV