The villain!"
"You are right," said I. "I think your mother ought to have--
scolded him, too."
"Now you promised, sir----" but Joe came up, and I escaped.
IV.
A REPENTANT SINNER.
It was, I believe, mainly as a compliment to me that Miss Audrey
Liston was asked to Poltons. Miss Liston and I were very good
friends, and my cousin Dora Polton thought, as she informed me,
that it would be nice for me to have someone I could talk to
about "books and so on." I did not complain. Miss Liston was a
pleasant young woman of six-and-twenty; I liked her very much
except on paper, and I was aware that she made it a point of duty
to read something at least of what I wrote. She was in the habit
of describing herself as an "authoress in a small way." If it
were pointed out that six three-volume novels in three years (the
term of her literary activity, at the time of which I
write) could hardly be called "a small way," she would smile
modestly and say that it was not really much; and if she were
told that the English language embraced no such word as
"authoress," she would smile again and say that it ought to; a
position toward the bugbear of correctness with which, I confess,
I sympathize in some degree. She was very diligent; she worked
from ten to one every day while she was at Poltons; how much she
wrote is between her and her conscience.
There was another impeachment which Miss Liston was hardly at the
trouble to deny.
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