"'
'Why, there you are! You're a sharp enough girl. You can quote as
well as anyone I know.'
'And please, why am I to take up an inferior kind of work?'
'Inferior? Oh, if you can be a George Eliot, begin at the
earliest opportunity. I merely suggested what seemed practicable.
But I don't think you have genius, Maud. People have got that
ancient prejudice so firmly rooted in their heads--that one
mustn't write save at the dictation of the Holy Spirit. I tell
you, writing is a business. Get together half-a-dozen fair
specimens of the Sunday-school prize; study them; discover the
essential points of such composition; hit upon new attractions;
then go to work methodically, so many pages a day. There's no
question of the divine afflatus; that belongs to another sphere
of life. We talk of literature as a trade, not of Homer, Dante,
and Shakespeare. If I could only get that into poor Reardon's
head. He thinks me a gross beast, often enough. What the devil--I
mean what on earth is there in typography to make everything it
deals with sacred? I don't advocate the propagation of vicious
literature; I speak only of good, coarse, marketable stuff for
the world's vulgar.
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