A MODERN CHRONICLE

By Winston Churchill


Volume 6.



CHAPTER VI

CLIO, OR THALIA?

According to the ordinary and inaccurate method of measuring time, a
fortnight may have gone by since the event last narrated, and Honora had
tasted at last the joys of authorship. Her name was not to appear, to be
sure, on the cover of the Life and Letters of General Angus Chiltern; nor
indeed, so far, had she written so much as a chapter or a page of a work
intended to inspire young and old with the virtues of citizenship. At
present the biography was in the crucial constructive stage. Should the
letters be put in one volume, and the life in another? or should the
letters be inserted in the text of the life? or could not there be a
third and judicious mixture of both of these methods? Honora's counsel on
this and other problems was, it seems, invaluable. Her own table was
fairly littered with biographies more or less famous which had been
fetched from the library, and the method of each considered.

Even as Mr. Garrick would never have been taken for an actor in his coach
and four, so our heroine did not in the least resemble George Eliot, for
instance, as she sat before her mirror at high noon with Monsieur Cadron