unequalled gift, especially pen in hand, of squeezing big mistakes
into small opportunities. She knew it, but she didn't care;
correctness was the virtue in the world that, like her heroes and
heroines, she valued least. Ethel, who had perceived in her pages
some remarkable lapses, undertook at one time to revise her proofs;
but I remember her telling me a year after the girl had left school
that this function had been very briefly exercised. "She can't read
me," said Mrs. Stormer; "I offend her taste. She tells me that at
Dresden--at school--I was never allowed." The good lady seemed
surprised at this, having the best conscience in the world about her
lucubrations. She had never meant to fly in the face of anything,
and considered that she grovelled before the Rhadamanthus of the
English literary tribunal, the celebrated and awful Young Person. I
assured her, as a joke, that she was frightfully indecent (she hadn't
in fact that reality any more than any other) my purpose being solely
to prevent her from guessing that her daughter had dropped her not
because she was immoral but because she was vulgar. I used to figure
her children closeted together and asking each other while they
exchanged a gaze of dismay: "Why should she BE so--and so FEARFULLY
so--when she has the advantage of our society? Shouldn't WE have
taught her better?" Then I imagined their recognising with a blush
and a shrug that she was unteachable, irreformable. Indeed she was,
poor lady; but it is never fair to read by the light of taste things
that were not written by it. Greville Fane had, in the topsy-turvy,
a serene good faith that ought to have been safe from allusion, like
a stutter or a faux pas.

She didn't make her son ashamed of the profession to which he was
destined, however; she only made him ashamed of the way she herself
exercised it. But he bore his humiliation much better than his