as a consecrated child. It had been a joke for Mrs. Stormer at
first, but the boy himself had been shrewd enough to make the matter
serious. If his mother accepted the principle that the intending
novelist cannot begin too early to see life, Leolin was not
interested in hanging back from the application of it. He was eager
to qualify himself, and took to cigarettes at ten, on the highest
literary grounds. His poor mother gazed at him with extravagant envy
and, like Desdemona, wished heaven had made HER such a man. She
explained to me more than once that in her profession she had found
her sex a dreadful drawback. She loved the story of Madame George
Sand's early rebellion against this hindrance, and believed that if
she had worn trousers she could have written as well as that lady.
Leolin had for the career at least the qualification of trousers, and
as he grew older he recognised its importance by laying in an immense
assortment. He grew up in gorgeous apparel, which was his way of
interpreting his mother's system. Whenever I met her I found her
still under the impression that she was carrying this system out and
that Leolin's training was bearing fruit. She was giving him
experience, she was giving him impressions, she was putting a
gagnepain into his hand. It was another name for spoiling him with
the best conscience in the world. The queerest pictures come back to
me of this period of the good lady's life and of the extraordinarily
virtuous, muddled, bewildering tenor of it. She had an idea that she
was seeing foreign manners as well as her petticoats would allow;
but, in reality she was not seeing anything, least of all fortunately
how much she was laughed at. She drove her whimsical pen at Dresden
and at Florence, and produced in all places and at all times the same
romantic and ridiculous fictions. She carried about her box of
properties and fished out promptly the familiar, tarnished old
puppets. She believed in them when others couldn't, and as they were