Page:Twilight Hours (1868).djvu/17

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MEMOIR
xiii

successful, seemed to be opening before her. She had the pleasure of finding herself appreciated. What came to her in payment for her contributions — received with a deprecating wonder that was not without a touch of humour — was to her as a deodand, to be disposed of in many acts of kindness to the sick and poor.

And it was clear, the more closely we were brought into contact with her, that hers was one of those characters which success does not spoil — that the power of uttering herself freely tended to ripen both the thoughts that struggled for utterance and the gift of clothing them in words. It was clear, also, that below a nature bright, cheerful, happy — flashing out sometimes into scintillations of genial and fantastic originality, not unlike Elia's — there was a soul working its way through the problems of life as they present themselves to all thinkers, bearing bravely also some special burden of its own. The social sketches which she wrote for the "Argosy," under another nom de plume, as "The Foozy Papers," though obviously defective from their limited range of observation, pointed to the possibility of her taking a fair place some day among our lady novelists. The poems which appeared in the other serials I have named, gave promise, as it seemed to me, of something higher. So far as I was