The “celebrity” had been a “celebrity” so long that she had left off objecting to the outward indications of her supremacy. Though she was a lion, and gave lectures, she was modest and easily pacified. She was fascinated by something curiously plaintive and beguiling about her hostess’s voice and manner; a suggestion of childishness, of almost weakness as she thought, in its artificial cadences. For it was an affectation, Miss Giles, whose nom-de-guerre was Egidia, decided, though a pleasing one. “I wonder if she scolds her servants in that tone?” she thought, while submitting to the charm, and, lying easily back in her chair, listened to her hostess’s ecstasies about her books and her lectures, her prettily expressed enviousness of the presumably happier conditions of her guest’s life in London. “Oh, what it must be to be in the midst of life, really in it--of it--part of it! Here one sits, and yearns, and only catches the far-away echoes, the reverberations of the delightful things that are happening, away down there, where you are--in the very, very heart of it all!” The peri left out of Paradise clasped her pretty, soft, pliant hands, and the novelist asked her, willing to be instructed, “Is Newcastle, then, worse than other provincial towns?” “I only know Newcastle, but I am sure it’s worse. There are a few nice advanced people, but they go away all the time, or if they bring nice people down from London, they keep them to themselves. I never see any one worth talking to. Oh, it is hopeless--hopeless!” She shrugged her shoulders. “It is simply a form of Hades,--this life for me, for I have ‘glimpses of what might make me less forlorn,’ of a life to live, a world to move in. I feel I was not meant to merely stagnate--to vegetate--to wither gradually away, consumed by my own wasted energies. You laugh! coming straight, as you do, from that paradise of life and movement, that I am sure London is, you can have no idea of what Newcastle and my life is! Inertia kills people like me, one’s soul is starved, don’t you know?--one’s mental life has nothing to feed on, no pabulum, except books--and they are not easy to get--new books. I am the trial and pest of the libraries here!” “You read a great deal?” “Oh, yes. I live on books. They are the greatest possible comfort to me. They are literally my saviours. I quite sympathize with the heroine of a novel I read lately, who was kept from suicide by the sight of her favourite poets on her book-shelf! I make myself up a dream-life, don’t you know--the life I should like to live if I could choose. One dream-life, do I say?” Her eyes lightened and brightened: she was extraordinarily alert and vivid. “Two or three--a perfect orgy of dream-lives! They cost nothing. But I have always read a great deal. The classics I don’t neglect. I read Plato before I was fifteen--in Jowett’s translation, of course.” Egidia smiled. “And your books?” “Don’t! don’t!” Egidia held up her hands.