‘And I shall not be wanted at all,’ said Picotee, in a melancholy tone.

‘It is much better to stay where you are,’ her mother said.  ’You will come and spend the holidays with us, of course, as you do now.’

‘I should like to live in London best,’ murmured Picotee, her head sinking mournfully to one side.  ‘I hate being in Sandbourne now!’

‘Nonsense!’ said Ethelberta severely.  ’We are all contriving how to live most comfortably, and it is by far the best thing for you to stay at the school.  You used to be happy enough there.’

Picotee sighed, and said no more.

16.  A large public hall

It was the second week in February, Parliament had just met, and
Ethelberta appeared for the first time before an audience in London.

There was some novelty in the species of entertainment that the active young woman had proposed to herself, and this doubtless had due effect in collecting the body of strangers that greeted her entry, over and above those friends who came to listen to her as a matter of course.  Men and women who had become totally indifferent to new actresses, new readers, and new singers, once more felt the freshness of curiosity as they considered the promise of the announcement.  But the chief inducement to attend lay in the fact that here was to be seen in the flesh a woman with whom the tongue of rumour had been busy in many romantic ways—­a woman who, whatever else might be doubted, had certainly produced a volume of verses which had been the talk of the many who had read them, and of the many more who had not, for several consecutive weeks.

What was her story to be?  Persons interested in the inquiry—­a small proportion, it may be owned, of the whole London public, and chiefly young men—­answered this question for themselves by assuming that it would take the form of some pungent and gratifying revelation of the innermost events of her own life, from which her gushing lines had sprung as an inevitable consequence, and which being once known, would cause such musical poesy to appear no longer wonderful.

The front part of the room was well filled, rows of listeners showing themselves like a drilled-in crop of which not a seed has failed.  They were listeners of the right sort, a majority having noses of the prominent and dignified type, which when viewed in oblique perspective ranged as regularly as bow-windows at a watering place.  Ethelberta’s plan was to tell her pretended history and adventures while sitting in a chair—­as if she were at her own fireside, surrounded by a circle of friends.  By this touch of domesticity a great appearance of truth and naturalness was given, though really the attitude was at first more difficult to maintain satisfactorily than any one wherein stricter formality should be observed.  She gently began her subject, as if scarcely knowing whether a throng were near her or