I am ashamed to say that once again, as in the case of "Aunt Anne," I endeavoured to exculpate myself in order to pacify two old maiden ladies. Why is it always the acutely unmarried who are made miserable by my books? Is it because--odious thought, avaunt!--married persons do not open them? These two ladies did not, indeed, think that I had been "paying out" some particular clergyman, as suggested in their favourite paper, _The Guardian_,[2] but they were shocked by the profanity of the book. Soon afterwards the Bishop of Stepney (now Bishop of London) preached on "Red Pottage" in St. Paul's. I sent them a newspaper which reprinted the sermon _verbatim_, with a note saying that I trusted this expression of opinion on the part of their idolised preacher might mitigate their condemnation of the book. But when have my attempts at making an effect ever come off? My firework never lights up properly like that of others! It only splutters and goes out. I received in due course a dignified answer that they had both been deeply distressed by my information, as it would prevent them ever going to hear the Bishop of Stepney again. My own experience, especially as to "Red Pottage" and "Prisoners," struck me as so direful, I seemed so peculiarly outside the protection of Providence, like the celebrated plot of ground on which "no rain nor no dew never fell," that I consulted several other brother and sister novelists as to how they had fared in this delicate matter. It is not for me to reveal the interesting skeletons concealed in cupboards not my own, but I have almost invariably returned from these interviews cheered, chuckling, and consoled by the comfortable realisation that others had writhed on a hotter gridiron than I. Georges Sand, when she was accused of lampooning a certain _abbe_, said that to draw one character of that kind one must know a thousand. She has, I think, put her finger on the truth which is not easy to find--at least, I never found it until I read those words of hers. It is necessary to know a very large number of persons of a certain kind before one can evolve a type. Each he or she contributes a twig, and the author weaves them into a nest. I have no doubt that I must have taken such a twig from nearly every clergyman I met who had a _soupcon_ of Mr. Gresley in him.