‘No, I hope I have grown rather more sensible. David set me to do stories for his lads, and, as he is dreadfully critical, it was very improving.’ ‘Did you write ‘Kate’s Jewel’? That is delightful. Aunt Jane gave it to Val this Christmas, and all of us have enjoyed it! We shall be quite proud of it--that is--may I tell the children?’ ‘Oh, aunt, you are very good to try to make me forget that miserable Clare. I wonder whether it will do any good to tell Dolores all about it. Only I can’t get at all the other girls I may have hurt.’ ‘Nay, Bessie, I think it most likely that Dolores would have been an uncomfortable damsel, even if Clare had remained in your brain. There were other causes, at any rate, here are three more persecuted nieces in her library. Besides, as you observed, everybody does not go to story-books for views of human nature, and happily, also, homeless children are commoner in books than out of them, so I don’t think the damage can be very extensive.’ ‘One such case is quite enough! Indeed, it is a great lesson to think whether what one writes can give any wrong notion.’ ‘I believe one always does begin with imitation.’ ‘Yes, it is extraordinary how little originality there is in the world. In the literature of my time, everybody had small hands and high foreheads, the girls wanted to do great things, and did, or did not do, little ones, and the boys all took first classes, and the fashion was to have violet eyes, so dark you could not tell their colour, and golden hair.’ ‘Whereas now the hair is apt to be bronze, whatever that may be like.’ ‘And all the dresses, and all the complexions, and all the lace, and all the roses, are creamy. Bessie, I hope you don’t deal in creaminess!’ ‘I’m afraid skim milk is more like me, and that you would say I had taken to the goody line. I never thought of the responsibility then, only when I wrote for David’s classes.’ ‘It is a responsibility, I suppose, in the way in which every word one speaks and every letter one writes is so. And now--here is Gillian finishing her piece. How far is it a secret, my dear.’ ‘It need not be so here, Aunt Lilias. Only my people are rather old-fashioned, you know, and are inclined to think it rather shocking of me, so it ought not to go beyond the family, and especially don’t ‘let her,’ indicating her grandmother, ‘hear about it. She knows I do such things--it would not be honest not to tell her--but it goes against the grain, and she has never heard one word of it all.’