“I see,” I repeated with a chill down my spine. “When you propagand for the top dogs it’s not propaganda: it’s like praising God: and God must be praised all the time or you’ll go to hell.”

Mr. Hardy laughed, but rather grimly. “See here, a man must take pride in his breed, and uphold the Empire.”

“Of course, but couldn’t there be different ways of upholding it?”

“Now, don’t spring any more of that socialist rot about the young men’s dreams, and the old men being able to rest, or you’re a goner as a writer. Editors would scent you a mile off. See here, the biggest literary success, the greatest artist today is the most rousing imperialist. Gad, if only I could write like Kipling!”

To succeed by his recipe I should have to deny what I honestly felt. I should have to keep my inner self hidden from Mr. Hardy or it would be bruised and sore. What puzzled me was that my first attempt was praised for its sincerity, and yet every man who wanted to marry me or to help me in my career immediately set out to change me into something entirely different. Why not in the first place seek the writings and the girls that they wanted me to be like? There were plenty of them. No one would ever have heard of me had I not been different, but that difference was immediately to be erased.

I could not argue with Mr. Hardy. My emotions made my thought go woozy when he dragooned me both for provincialism and drivelling sentiment about the under dog. It was, oh, so easy to fall back on being a girl. That was the only side of any woman Mr. Hardy would really want except those to do his cooking and laundry and other things that could be done for him equally well by men, only that he would have to pay them more.

His aunt was away for some days, and Mr. Hardy spent every one of them except Sunday with me alone. At the beginning it was a game of parry.

“Dear me,” he said on the second afternoon. “It is a shame that you have no pretty things. You are meant for evening dress: you have all the lines, and flesh like pink wax. Let me see your arms.”

I was shocked by this suggestion, but he insisted upon unbuttoning the simple wrist-band and turning up the bishop sleeve.

“Good gracious! and you waste your breath in admiring Edmée Actem. Her arms are drum-sticks compared with yours. To think of the scarecrows with the salt cellars under their ears and necks like a plucked fowl that are thrust upon a fellow in society, while you are covered up like a nun.” He insisted that mine was the arm of an odalisque, with dainty bones and dimpled wrist and elbow.

“Any man who wasn’t ossified would devour your arms,” he exclaimed, proceeding to act upon his word. Then he devoured my lips until I was almost unconscious.