Louise Imogen Guiney

								

is not the midnight lamp on a folio. He knows; he is baked through; all
superfluous effort and energy are over for him. To converse consumedly
upon the weather, and compare notes as to ‘whether it is likely to hold
up tomorrow,’—this, says Hazlitt, ‘is the end and privilege of a life
of study.’”
Mark you how humbly she proceeds, this multi-millionaire of the mind.
Her intellectual barns are bursting with fatness, her cattle are on
a thousand hills; yet she spares you not only the inventory of her
acquisitions but any hint of her respect for them. One is smilingly
glad to note that sometimes the challenge of the world’s intellectual
penury is really too much for her, and she cannot help rushing to the
rescue with armies of notable names and historic data. Still she did
converse consumedly upon the weather also, and it is one of the happy
incredibilities of her delightful disposition that she never repudiated
the intercourse of honest minds, even if they were dull. She adroitly
refrained from tossing them the ball she knew they could never return,
though with a curve imperfectly transcribed. She talked with them
about dogs and mushrooms—for there also she was sapient in a lore that
could be worn lightly and the more easily concealed—and the merciful
recipe for killing a lobster painlessly before you plunge him in the
ensanguining pot, of kittens and young furry donkeys and the universal
boon of weather. And she had a store of absurdities, never anecdotes
in the dire sense of cut-and-dried obstructors of the traffic between
mortal minds, but odd quips and spontaneous incongruities she was ready
to shower you withal. No less pretentious scholar ever walked a world
more suavely aware of her gracious charm, more happily oblivious of
the breaches she could make in worn conventions if she brought up her
artillery.
The personal revelations in Patrins are unmistakable to those who knew
her. She writes On the Delights of an Incognito. Who can fail to see L.
I. G. herself in the person of the hypothetical R., walking home after
“the day at a library desk” where he “had grown hazy with no food and
much reading?” And passing the house where he was always delightedly
welcome and where he loved to be, he looked in at the shining dinner
table where sat the family, unconscious of him and yet—he knew it—only
to be the merrier if he dropped in, and “hurried on, never quite so
paradoxically happy in his life as when he quitted that familiar
pane without rapping, and went back to the dark and the frost,
unapprehended, impersonal, aberrant, a spirit among men.” For Louise
Guiney, prettily as she conformed herself to accepted rules, was by
nature a vagrom under conventional roofs, a wandering breeze, an addict
of fern seed, a cloud, a rainbow fancy, whatever could make itself, as
speedily as might be, impalpable to the eye and only a memory to the