of fiction. If I have conveyed the impression that Leila Yorke was in
the lowest division of this class, I have done her less than justice;
quite a number of novelists were worse. This was not much satisfaction
to her children. Jane said, 'If you do that sort of thing at all, you
might as well make a job of it, and sell a million copies. I'd rather
be Mrs. Barclay or Ethel Dell or Charles Garvice or Gene Stratton
Porter or Ruby Ayres than mother. Mother's merely commonplace; she's
not even a by-word--quite. I admire dad more. Dad anyhow gets there.
His stuff sells.'

Mrs. Potter's novels, as a matter of fact, sold quite creditably. They
were pleasant to many, readable by more, and quite unmarred by any
spark of cleverness, flash of wit, or morbid taint of philosophy.
Gently and unsurprisingly she wrote of life and love as she believed
these two things to be, and found a home in the hearts of many
fellow-believers. She bored no one who read her, because she could be
relied on to give them what they hoped to find--and of how few of us,
alas, can this be said! And--she used to say it was because she was a
mother--her books were safe for the youngest _jeune fille_, and in
these days (even in those days it was so) of loose morality and frank
realism, how important this is.

'I hope I am as modern as any one,' Mrs. Potter would say, 'but I see no
call to be indecent.'

So many writers do see, or rather hear, this call, and obey it
faithfully, that many a parent was grateful to Leila Yorke. (It is only
fair to record here that in the year 1918 she heard it herself, and
became a psychoanalyst. But the time for this was not yet.)