And she wanted to know by return of post whether I was paid for these articles as much as I was paid for real articles; when she heard that I was paid better, she laughed again and had them out of the bandbox for re-reading, and it cannot be denied that she thought the London editor a fine fellow but slightly soft.
When I sent off that first sketch I thought I had exhausted the subject, but our editor wrote that he would like something more of the same, so I sent him a marriage, and he took it, and then I tried him with a funeral, and he took it, and really it began to look as if we had him.

Now my mother might have been discovered, in answer to certain excited letters, flinging the bundle of undarned socks from her lap, and 'going in for literature'; she was racking her brains, by request, for memories I might convert into articles, and they came to me in letters which she dictated to my sisters.

How well I could hear her sayings between the lines: 'But the editor-man will never stand that, it's perfect blethers'-- 'By this post it must go, I tell you; we must take the editor when he's hungry--we canna be blamed for it, can we?
he prints them of his free will, so the wite is his'-- 'But I'm near terrified .-- If London folk reads them we're done for.' And I was sounded as to the advisability of sending him a present of a lippie of shortbread, which was to be her crafty way of getting round him.

By this time, though my mother and I were hundreds of miles apart, you may picture us waving our hands to each other across country, and shouting 'Hurrah!' You may also picture the editor in his office thinking he was behaving like a shrewd man of business, and unconscious that up in the north there was an elderly lady chuckling so much at him that she could scarcely scrape the potatoes.
I was now able to see my mother again, and the park seats no longer loomed so prominent in our map of London.

Still, there they were, and it was with an effort that she summoned up courage to let me go.