So far I have told you about my friend in her literary, or, I may say, her public capacity only. But to really appreciate Mrs. Talespinner, one must know her in her home, one must have enjoyed her frequent companionship. Outsiders, who judge her only from the virile vigour of her writings, and the audacity of her subjects and their treatment, or those even who know her only through the daring frankness of her conversation, can have no idea of the essential womanliness of her nature. No woman, perhaps, ever so thoroughly got mentally on the outside of herself, and lived intellectually apart from her own womanhood. Thus she is a kind of female version of “Hyde and Jekyll,” the Hyde being her literary personality, the Jekyll her sentimental self. It is, therefore, very difficult to know her as she actually is. She will, for instance, catch at some view of a subject which is in direct opposition to that held by those with whom she is conversing, and will obstinately argue it out, merely for the intellectual pleasure she derives from the independence of the position she has assumed. She may really be in exact accord with her hearers, but the delight to her of saying startling things, and of warring with words, is similar to that experienced by the skilful boxer in a bout with the gloves. But she is not a good stayer, and she is frequently beaten by an argumentative blow that is straight and strong, while she is honest enough to own her defeat afterwards, though perhaps not immediately. She always relies on her strength, but yet knows her weakness; for she will frankly avow that she is easily influenced. In the course of conversation, however, she will sometimes be carried away by fine-sounding phrases which, analysed, are mere verbiage. She will make statements which may be quite foreign to her real nature, and, to those who do not know her, she will convey an entirely false impression of her mental tone, though her mind will have flashed its vitality before them like a heliograph. The essential qualities of her mind, in fact, are catholicity of interest, active audacity, and the quickness and vividness with which she receives an idea, or perceives a fact, and passes it out again through the crucible of her own sentiency and experience. It is the same whether she be conversing on any topic of the day or writing one of her stories. The idyls and the epics of life, the romantic love-story, the heroism of noble souls, interest her without impelling her pen to activity; but her literary and conversational enthusiasm is aroused by those sordid realities which the daily journals bring to light, by those stories of life in which the morality is crook-backed and twisted and the humanity limps with a cloven hoof.