I liked her--she rested me so from literature. To myself literature
was an irritation, a torment; but Greville Fane slumbered in the
intellectual part of it like a Creole in a hammock. She was not a
woman of genius, but her faculty was so special, so much a gift out
of hand, that I have often wondered why she fell below that
distinction. This was doubtless because the transaction, in her
case, had remained incomplete; genius always pays for the gift, feels
the debt, and she was placidly unconscious of obligation. She could
invent stories by the yard, but she couldn't write a page of English.
She went down to her grave without suspecting that though she had
contributed volumes to the diversion of her contemporaries she had
not contributed a sentence to the language. This had not prevented
bushels of criticism from being heaped upon her head; she was worth a
couple of columns any day to the weekly papers, in which it was shown
that her pictures of life were dreadful but her style really
charming. She asked me to come and see her, and I went. She lived
then in Montpellier Square; which helped me to see how dissociated
her imagination was from her character.

An industrious widow, devoted to her daily stint, to meeting the
butcher and baker and making a home for her son and daughter, from
the moment she took her pen in her hand she became a creature of
passion. She thought the English novel deplorably wanting in that
element, and the task she had cut out for herself was to supply the
deficiency. Passion in high life was the general formula of this
work, for her imagination was at home only in the most exalted
circles. She adored, in truth, the aristocracy, and they constituted
for her the romance of the world or, what is more to the point, the
prime material of fiction. Their beauty and luxury, their loves and
revenges, their temptations and surrenders, their immoralities and