EXPERIENCE

PREFACE

It has been said that 'Novelists are the Showmen of life.' Perhaps because the world has passed through a time of special stress and strain it has come about that the modern novel is largely concerned with the complexities of life and is very often an unhappy and a tiring thing to read.

Yet humour, happiness, and love exist and are just as real as gloom, so need the 'realism' of a book be called in question because it pictures pleasant scenes?

For there are still some joyous souls who smile their way through life because they take its experience with a simplicity that is rarer than it used to be.

This, then, is the story of a woman whose outlook was a happy one; whose mind was never rent by any great temptations, and who, because she was NOT 'misunderstood in early youth,' never struggled for 'self-expression,' but only to express herself (in as many words as possible!) to the great amusement and uplifting of her family!

For these reasons this book, like that of the immortal Mr Jorrocks, 'does not aspire to the dignity of a novel,' but is just a story—an April mixture of sun and shadow—as most lives are; a book to read when you're tired, perhaps, since it tells of love and a home and garden and such like restful things. And if it makes you smile and sigh at times, well, maybe, that is because life brings to many of us, especially to the women folk, very much the same 'experience.'

C. C.

PART I

'When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child....'

CHAPTER I

Aunt Constance was away, but, as it was my birthday, I invited myself to lunch with Uncle Jasper. Father and Ross came too. In the middle of lunch my uncle looked at me over the top of his glasses and said,—

'Well, Meg, so you are seventeen and have left school. What are you going to do now?'

An idea that had been simmering in my mind for some days suddenly came on top,—

'I'm going to write a book.'

Ross stared at me, aghast. 'Jerubbesheth!' he exclaimed, 'when you could hunt three days a week, walk a puppy, and do the things that really matter. What fools girls are!'

'Have you sufficient knowledge of any one subject to write a book about it?' Uncle Jasper inquired.

'Oh, my angel,' I exclaimed, 'I don't refer to the stuff you and father produce. I'm not going to write a treatise on architecture, or Dante, or the Cumulative Evidences of the Cherubim. I mean fiction—a story—a novel.'

'But even so,' persisted my uncle, 'you can't write about things of which you know nothing!'

'But you don't have to know about things when you write fiction. You make it up as you go along, don't you see?'

'You only want a hero and a heroine and a plot,' my brother giggled.

'And a strong love interest,' said father, and he twinkled at me; 'even Dante——'

'Oh, daddy, must you bring in Dante?' I said. 'He was such a terrible old bore and he didn't even marry the girl.'

Uncle Jasper gazed at me as if I were a tame gorilla or a missing link, or something that looked as if it ought to have brains but somehow hadn't. 'Dear me!' he said. 'Well, go on, Meg, but if you merely make up your story as you go along you will get your background dim and confused and your characterisation weak.'

'I can't think what you mean,' I groaned.

'Why, Meg, if you lay your plot in the fourteenth century, for instance, your characters must be clear cut, mediæval, and tone with the background, don't you see? It would require a great deal of research to get the atmosphere of your century right.'

'But I shan't write about the fourteenth century,' I said in slow exasperation. 'My book will be about the present time. I shall write of the things I know.'

'Well, but what do you know, little 'un? That's what we are trying to get at,' said daddy, with his appalling habit of bringing things suddenly to a head.

'It's rather difficult to say offhand, father, but I know something of the fauna of the South Pole, and about Influenza (I've had it four times), and a lot about ski-ing——'

'If you could see yourself ski-ing you wouldn't say so,' said my brother with his usual candour, 'your methods are those of a Lilienfeldian wart-hog, and as for your Telemarks—ye gods!'