diamonds were as familiar to her as the blots on her writing-table.
She was not a belated producer of the old fashionable novel, she had
a cleverness and a modernness of her own, she had freshened up the
fly-blown tinsel. She turned off plots by the hundred and--so far as
her flying quill could convey her--was perpetually going abroad. Her
types, her illustrations, her tone were nothing if not cosmopolitan.
She recognised nothing less provincial than European society, and her
fine folk knew each other and made love to each other from Doncaster
to Bucharest. She had an idea that she resembled Balzac, and her
favourite historical characters were Lucien de Rubempre and the
Vidame de Pamiers. I must add that when I once asked her who the
latter personage was she was unable to tell me. She was very brave
and healthy and cheerful, very abundant and innocent and wicked. She
was clever and vulgar and snobbish, and never so intensely British as
when she was particularly foreign.

This combination of qualities had brought her early success, and I
remember having heard with wonder and envy of what she "got," in
those days, for a novel. The revelation gave me a pang: it was such
a proof that, practising a totally different style, I should never
make my fortune. And yet when, as I knew her better she told me her
real tariff and I saw how rumour had quadrupled it, I liked her
enough to be sorry. After a while I discovered too that if she got
less it was not that _I_ was to get any more. My failure never had
what Mrs. Stormer would have called the banality of being relative--
it was always admirably absolute. She lived at ease however in those
days--ease is exactly the word, though she produced three novels a
year. She scorned me when I spoke of difficulty--it was the only
thing that made her angry. If I hinted that a work of art required a
tremendous licking into shape she thought it a pretension and a pose.