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.
Stormer's who was staying there happened to mention to me later that
he had seen the young apprentice to fiction driving, in a dogcart, a
young lady with a very pink face. When I suggested that she was
perhaps a woman of title with whom he was conscientiously flirting my
informant replied: "She is indeed, but do you know what her title