And I read it with an augmenting irritation. Here was my great and comely idea transmuted by "George Glock"--which was the woman's foolish pen-name,--into a rather clever melodrama, and set forth anyhow, in a hit or miss style that fairly made me squirm. I would cheerfully have strangled Marian Winwood just then, and not upon the count of larceny, but of butchery.
"And to cap it all, she has assigned her hero every pretty speech I ever made to her! I honestly believe the rogue took shorthand jottings on her cuffs. 'There is a land where lovers may meet face to face, and heart to heart, and mouth to mouth'--why, that's the note I wrote her on the day she wasn't feeling well!"
Presently, however, I began to laugh, and presently sitting there alone, I began to applaud as if I were witnessing a play that took my fancy.
"Oh, the adorable jade!" I said; and then: "George Glock, forsooth! _George Dandin, tu l' as voulu._"
Naturally I put the entire affair into a short story. And--though even to myself it seems incredible,--Miss Winwood wrote me within three days of the tale's appearance, a very indignant letter.
For she was furious, to the last exclamation point and underlining, about my little magazine tale.... "Why don't you stop writing, and try plumbing or butchering or traveling for scented soap? _You can't write!_ If you had the light of creation you wouldn't be using my material"....
--Which caused me to reflect forlornly that I had wasted a great deal of correct behavior upon Marian, since any of the more intimately amorous advances which I might have made, and had scrupulously refrained from making, would very probably have been regarded as raw "material," to be developed rather than shocked by....
I had, in a general way, intended to marry Rosalind Jemmett so soon as I had completed _As the Coming of Dawn_; but in the fervour of writing that unfortunate volume, I had at first put off a little, and then a little longer, the answering of her last letter, because I was interested just then in writing well and not particularly interested in anything else; and I had finally approximated to forgetfulness of the young lady's existence.
Now, however, my thoughts harked back to her; and I found, upon inquiry, that Rosalind had spent all of May and a good half of April in Lichfield, in the same town with myself, and was now engaged to Alfred Chaytor,--an estimable person, but popularly known as "Sissy" Chaytor.