than his poor mother, who never had time to read anything and could
only be vivid with her pen. If I didn't kick him downstairs it was
because he would have alighted on her at the bottom.

When she went to live at Primrose Hill I called upon her and found
her weary and wasted. It had waned a good deal, the elation caused
the year before by Ethel's marriage; the foam on the cup had subsided
and there was a bitterness in the draught.

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