’My dear Ethelberta,—­I did not intend to write to you for some few days to come, but the way in which you have been talked about here this evening makes me anxious to send a line or two at once, though I have very little time to spare, as usual.  We have just had a dinner- party—­indeed the carriages have not yet been brought round—­and the talk at dinner was about your verses, of course.  The thing was brought up by a young fellow named Ladywell—­do you know him?  He is a painter by profession, but he has a pretty good private income beyond what he gets by practising his line of business among the nobility, and that I expect is not little, for he is well known, and encouraged because he is young, and good-looking, and so forth.  His family own a good bit of land somewhere out Aldbrickham way.  However, I am before my story.  From what they all said it is pretty clear that you are thought a great deal of in fashionable society as a poetess—­but perhaps you know this as well as I—­moving in it as you do yourself, my dear.

’The ladies afterwards got very curious about your age, so curious, in fact, and so full of certainty that you were thirty-five and a blighted existence, if an hour, that I felt inclined to rap out there and then, and hang what came of it:  “My daughter, ladies, was to my own and her mother’s certain knowledge only twenty-one last birthday, and has as bright a heart as anybody in London.”  One of them actually said that you must be fifty to have got such an experience.  Her guess was a very shrewd one in the bottom of it, however, for it was grounded upon the way you use those strange experiences of mine in the society that I tell you of, and dress them up as if they were yours; and, as you see, she hit off my own age to a year.  I thought it was very sharp of her to be so right, although so wrong.

’I do not want to influence your plans in any way about things which your school learning fits you to understand much better than I, who never had such opportunities, but I think that if I were in your place, Berta, I would not let my name be known just yet, for people always want what’s kept from them, and don’t value what’s given.  I am not sure, but I think that after the women had gone upstairs the others turned their thoughts upon you again; what they said about you I don’t know, for if there’s one thing I hate ’tis hanging about the doors when the men begin to get moved by their wine, which they did to a large extent to-night, and spoke very loud.  They always do here, for old Don is a hearty giver in his way.  However, as you see these people from their own level now, it is not much that I can tell you in seeing them only from the under side, though I see strange things sometimes, and of course—­

      “What great ones do the less will prattle of,”

   as it says in that book of select pieces that you gave me.