She was already too remote from the life of Sparta to care very much one way or another, but such feeling as she had was of that sort.

And the compliments from the minister, from various members of the Browning Club, from the editor himself, that filtered through her mother's letters during the next two or three weeks, made her shrug with their absolute irrelevance to the only praise that could thrill her and the only purpose she held dear.
Even now, when the printed lines contained the significance of a possible resource, she did not give so much as a thought to the flattering opinion of Sparta as her mother had conveyed it to her.

She read them over and over, relying desperately on her own critical sense and her knowledge of what the Paris correspondent of the _Daily Dial_ thought of her chances in that direction.

He, Frank Parke, had told her once that if her brush failed she had only to try her pen, though he made use of no such commonplace as that.

He said it, too, at the end of half an hour's talk with her, only half an hour.