"Oh no!" cried Leonora, who was interested and taken out of herself by his talk. "But I think I prefer the 'exceptional true stories,' as you call them, like Shakespeare,--the historical part, I mean."
"The worst of it is," said Batiscombe, "that the true stories are generally the ones that no one believes. Critics always say that such things are a tissue of utter impossibilities."
"Oh, the critics," exclaimed Leonora; "they must be the most horrid people. I wonder you authors let them live!"
"Thanks," said Batiscombe, laughing, "I was a critic myself before I was an author, and I do not think I was a very horrid person."
"That is different," said Leonora. "Of course a man may do ever so many things before he finds his real vocation."
"Authors owe a great deal to critics," continued Julius. "More men have come to grief at their hands by over-praise than by too much discouragement. A very little praise is often enough to ruin a man, and a man who has much talent will always survive a great deal of abuse and disappointment. If any one asked my advice about adopting literature as a career, I would certainly tell him to have nothing to do with it; I should be quite sure that if he were born to it nothing would keep him from it for long."
"That is the way with other things," said Leonora, looking rather wistfully away at the setting sun, just below the green leaves of the orange grove. "It is the way with everything, good and bad. Some people are born to be saints, and some people are quite sure to turn out the most dreadful sinners, whatever they do."
"What a depressing theory!" exclaimed Batiscombe, who had much more cause to think so than Leonora.
"Depressing is no name for it," she answered. "One makes such mistakes in life, and then there is no way out of it but to make others."
"And the worst of it is, that one knows one is making them, and cannot help it."
"Yes," said she, "one always knows,--if one only knew." Then she laughed suddenly. "What a ridiculous speech!"
"No," said Batiscombe, "I understand exactly what you mean. Just when one is doing the wrong thing, there is always a little instinct against it. But it is often so very little, that one does not quite know it from ever so many other instincts. And then, before one is quite sure that one knows what is right,--before one's mind has time to think it over logically,--one has done the wrong thing. At least, it seems afterwards as if that were what happened; but I suppose it is because we are weak."