She had had to take a cheaper house and she had to work still harder to pay even for that.Sir Baldwin was obliged to be close; his charges were fearful, and the dream of her living with her daughter (a vision she had never mentioned to me) must be renounced."I would have helped with things, and I could have lived perfectly in one room," she said; "I would have paid for everything, and--after all--I'm some one, ain't I? But I don't fit in, and Ethel tells me there are tiresome people she MUST receive.I can help them from here, no doubt, better than from there.She told me once, you know, what she thinks of my picture of life.'Mamma, your picture of life is preposterous!' No doubt it is, but she's vexed with me for letting my prices go down; and I had to write three novels to pay for all her marriage cost me.I did it very well--I mean the outfit and the wedding; but that's why I'm here.At any rate she doesn't want a dingy old woman in her house.I should give it an atmosphere of literary glory, but literary glory is only the eminence of nobodies.
Besides, she doubts my glory--she knows I'm glorious only at Peckham and Hackney.She doesn't want her friends to ask if I've never known nice people.She can't tell them I've never been in society.She tried to teach me better once, but I couldn't learn.It would seem too as if Peckham and Hackney had had enough of me; for (don't tell any one!) I've had to take less for my last than I ever took for anything." I asked her how little this had been, not from curiosity, but in order to upbraid her, more disinterestedly than Lady Luard had done, for such concessions.She answered "I'm ashamed to tell you,"and then she began to cry.
I had never seen her break down, and I was proportionately moved; she sobbed, like a frightened child, over the extinction of her vogue and the exhaustion of her vein.Her little workroom seemed indeed a barren place to grow flowers, and I wondered, in the after years (for she continued to produce and publish) by what desperate and heroic process she dragged them out of the soil.I remember asking her on that occasion what had become of Leolin, and how much longer she intended to allow him to amuse himself at her cost.She rejoined with spirit, wiping her eyes, that he was down at Brighton hard at work--he was in the midst of a novel--and that he FELT life so, in all its misery and mystery, that it was cruel to speak of such experiences as a pleasure."He goes beneath the surface," she said, "and he FORCES himself to look at things from which he would rather turn away.Do you call that amusing yourself? You should see his face sometimes! And he does it for me as much as for himself.He tells me everything--he comes home to me with his trouvailles.We are artists together, and to the artist all things are pure.I've often heard you say so yourself." The novel that Leolin was engaged in at Brighton was never published, but a friend of mine and of Mrs.