“Yes,” said the editor, “Miss Van —— is the poetess of passion—of boarding-house passion.”
I never came away from one of these evenings without feeling that I had been partaking of intellectual champagne.
When I was in America Eugene Field edited one of the great Chicago dailies, and was the principal author of the West. My first meeting with him was a characteristic one. I was at an at-home in New York, talking to the editress of a fashion paper, who had also written books of twaddly gush about travel. The hostess brought up Field, and introduced him to the editress.
“Very glad to meet you, ma’am,” he said. “I think I may say that I have read all your books with the greatest interest.”
“Are you a writer, Mr. Field?” she asked. “I am sorry to say that I have never heard of you.”
“Nor I you, ma’am; but you might have pretended, same as I did.”
There used to be very large at-homes every Sunday night at the flat of a wealthy old lady who owned an important newspaper. Her guests were mostly authors and artists, and she hardly knew any of them by sight, and never gave any of them commissions to work for her paper. Sometimes she did not even put in an appearance at her at-homes, which went on just the same, as if she had been there. Her guests came to meet each other, not her. She was not at all literary; her only ambition was like Queen Elizabeth’s—to be taken for a young and beautiful woman. She was no longer either, but she dressed the part. Young America used openly to make fun of her weakness on these occasions, and I well remember the editor of _Puck_ (a New York comic paper), to whom she was showing a beautiful copy of Canova’s nude statue of Napoleon’s sister, Pauline Borghese, gravely pretending that he thought it was a statue of herself, and complimenting her on the likeness which the sculptor had achieved. His impudence carried him through; his delighted hostess believed that he believed it, and explained, with genuine colour coming into her rouged cheeks, that in spite of the likeness, it was not her, but “Princess Pauline.”
As the refreshments at this house were on a very liberal scale, it was a good place to meet the section of the Press which is not satisfied with a mere feast of reason and flow of soul. One also met fame-hunters, like the sculptor whom I will call Vermont, who came to cultivate the Press. I was introduced to him at this house, and I hoped that I should never see him again, because he was such a colossal egotist. One day, a few years afterwards, to my dismay, I met him in Fleet Street. I said, “How do you do, Mr. Vermont?”