第4章

I could see that this necessity grew upon her during the years she spent abroad, when I had glimpses of her in the shifting sojourns that lay in the path of my annual ramble.She betook herself from Germany to Switzerland and from Switzerland to Italy; she favoured cheap places and set up her desk in the smaller capitals.I took a look at her whenever I could, and I always asked how Leolin was getting on.She gave me beautiful accounts of him, and whenever it was possible the boy was produced for my edification.I had entered from the first into the joke of his career--I pretended to regard him as a consecrated child.It had been a joke for Mrs.Stormer at first, but the boy himself had been shrewd enough to make the matter serious.If his mother accepted the principle that the intending novelist cannot begin too early to see life, Leolin was not interested in hanging back from the application of it.He was eager to qualify himself, and took to cigarettes at ten, on the highest literary grounds.His poor mother gazed at him with extravagant envy and, like Desdemona, wished heaven had made HER such a man.She explained to me more than once that in her profession she had found her sex a dreadful drawback.She loved the story of Madame George Sand's early rebellion against this hindrance, and believed that if she had worn trousers she could have written as well as that lady.

Leolin had for the career at least the qualification of trousers, and as he grew older he recognised its importance by laying in an immense assortment.He grew up in gorgeous apparel, which was his way of interpreting his mother's system.Whenever I met her I found her still under the impression that she was carrying this system out and that Leolin's training was bearing fruit.She was giving him experience, she was giving him impressions, she was putting a gagnepain into his hand.It was another name for spoiling him with the best conscience in the world.The queerest pictures come back to me of this period of the good lady's life and of the extraordinarily virtuous, muddled, bewildering tenor of it.She had an idea that she was seeing foreign manners as well as her petticoats would allow;but, in reality she was not seeing anything, least of all fortunately how much she was laughed at.She drove her whimsical pen at Dresden and at Florence, and produced in all places and at all times the same romantic and ridiculous fictions.She carried about her box of properties and fished out promptly the familiar, tarnished old puppets.She believed in them when others couldn't, and as they were like nothing that was to be seen under the sun it was impossible to prove by comparison that they were wrong.You can't compare birds and fishes; you could only feel that, as Greville Fane's characters had the fine plumage of the former species, human beings must be of the latter.