"Pray do," cried Mabel, with ill-suppressed irritation. "Sincerity is such a delightful thing. No doubt my critics are sincere. They give me the honest undisguised truth." Rorie saw that his betrothed's literary failure was a subject to be carefully avoided in future. "My poor Vixen," he said to himself, with oh! what deep regret, "perhaps it was not one of the least of your charms that you never wrote poetry." Lord Mallow was coming to Ashbourne for the fortnight before the wedding. He had made himself wondrously agreeable to the Duke, and the Duke had invited him. The House would be up by that time. It was a delightful season for the Forest. The heather would be in bloom on all the open heights, the glades of Mark Ash would be a solemn world of greenery and shadow, a delicious place for picnics, flirtation, and gipsy tea-drinkings. Lord Mallow had only seen the Forest in the winter. It would be a grand opportunity for him. He came, and Lady Mabel received him with a sad sweet smile. The reviews had all appeared by this time: and, except in the _West Dulmarsh Gazette_ and the _Ratdiff Highway Register_, there had not been one favourable notice. "There is a dreadful unanimity about my critics, is there not?" said the stricken poetess, when she and Lord Mallow found themselves alone together in one of the orchid-houses, breathing a perfumed atmosphere at eighty degrees, vaporous, balmy, slumberous. "You have made a tremendous mistake, Lady Mabel," said Lord Mallow. "How do you mean?" "You have given the world your great book without first educating your public to receive and understand it. If Browning had done the same thing--if Browning had burst at once upon the world with 'The Ring and the Book' he would have been as great a failure as--as--you at present imagine yourself to be. You should have sent forth something smaller. You should have made the reading world familiar with a style, too original, and of too large a power and scope, to please quickly. A volume of ballads and idyls--a short story in simple verse--would have prepared the way for your dramatic poem. Suppose Goethe had begun his literary career with the second part of 'Faust'! He was too wise for that, and wrote himself into popularity with a claptrap novel." "I could not write a claptrap novel, or claptrap verses," sighed Lady Mabel. "If I cannot soar above the clouds, I will never spread my poor little wings again." "Then you must be content to accept your failure as an evidence of the tendencies of an essentially Philistine age--an age in which people admire Brown, and Jones, and Robinson." Here Lord Mallow gave a string of names, sacrificing the most famous reputations of the age to Mabel Ashbourne's vanity.