On the staircase

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1914 Excerpt: ... in what estimation she held authors. She would have to turn from the social conditions of Paraguay to a feeble comedy which never could be produced; and from transcribing old Latin from old books, and the senile annotations of a dotardly professor, to the vacuities of a young novelist busily engaged in sweating out witty conversations that set her teeth on edge. She did not dare to make a mistake: her employers charged fifteen pence a thousand words, with the guarantee that the work should be done by erudite gentlewomen. So obviously there was no room for mistakes, whatever the weather, whatever Barbara's feelings, however early the electric lights should begin to swiggle in the draught between the window and the door. Barbara, on the whole, was happy. The worst handwriting was at last to be read, and some of the ingenuity needed recoiled upon her in the shape of complacency. The feeblest manuscript underwent transformation in type, and seemed as though Barbara's contempt had straightened its back. And she felt so heroically and specially Barbara Gretton at the end of the day that the consciousness was worth all her toil. She forgot Amberley: she remembered only how splendid it was to be Barbara Gretton. Nobody but Amberley had ever seemed to question that splendour; and at the end of each day Amberley sank very far into the background under her disdainful disregard. Amused at her, indeed! Helpless! A stronger will! She swept the phrases aside. It was only when she was really tired, in those moods of low mental vitality which are well known to professors of psychology, that the phrases crowded upon her. That was because they had been so cumulative, and so unexpected. They had been, in a way, so unerring, expressed with so much simple conviction, by people ...