Miss Buncle Married by D. E. Stevenson

through his spectacles. He’s not thin and dry like Mr. Tupper, and he’s the sort of man who minds a lot whether you like him or not, and he likes you to think he’s very clever and very important because he knows, in his inmost heart, that he’s not clever or important at all. So he puts on very grown-up airs, and swanks a little in front of the clerks, because it would be so awful if the clerks found out that he’s just a little boy pretending to be a grown-up lawyer.”
    Mr. Abbott digested all this with interest—not because he was the slightest bit interested in Mr. Tyler, a man he did not know, but because he was tremendously interested in Barbara, whom, after eighteen months of daily contact, he was just beginning to know. The strangest thing about Barbara, Arthur reflected, the strangest thing about this strange woman who was now his lawful wedded wife, was that although she understood practically nothing, she yet understood everything.
    She might or might not have “an imagination” (Arthur could not be sure of that), but she certainly had an extraordinary power of getting underneath people’s skins. Without being conscious of it herself she was able to sum up a person or a situation in a few minutes. People’s very bones were bare to her—and she had no idea of it. She used the very simplest language to voice her thoughts—quite often her expressions were couched in doubtful grammar—but this, in some strange manner, seemed to enhance their piquant flavor. Mr. Abbott could not understand it, but the very fact that he could not understand it intrigued him all the more. It was not that Barbara was illiterate, for when she had a pen in her hand her thoughts flowed freely, and flowed in perfectly good English, and, this being so, why was it that for everyday purposes she employed only the most colloquial expressions, and used banalities and hackneyed idioms? Barbara loved proverbs and worn-out clichés, and this was not because she was lazy and slipshod—as most people are who employ these phrases. (When she had insisted on calling her last book The Pen Is Mightier— she had called it that in all sincerity, and not in a satirical spirit with her tongue in her cheek as so many people had thought. No, she had called her book The Pen Is Mightier— simply because she had discovered—somewhat to her surprise—what a mighty weapon the pen was, when wielded by her hand. She had seen the good and the evil that her first book had wrought in Silverstream, and the sheer force of her sincerity had made the trite saying her own.)
    I wonder what it is, thought Mr. Abbott, as they walked round the garden in friendly contented silence, I wonder what it is that makes Barbara’s books sell like they do. Has she genius—as Spicer declares—or only natural facility, natural talent? And, if it is genius, am I justified in not encouraging her to exercise it? But what is the difference, he wondered. Just where does talent merge into genius? If talent is a natural aptitude for creation with an outlook on life peculiar to oneself, then genius is to have an outlook on life, peculiar to oneself, which yet appeals to everybody. Talent is for oneself and a few others, but genius is universal. Judged by this standard Barbara must very nearly have genius—if not quite—for her books seem to appeal to an enormous number of people in every class and every walk of life. But I shan’t worry her, he thought, I shall just leave it alone, and, if she wants to write she can write, and if she doesn’t want to, she needn’t. That’s what I said at the very beginning, and I shall stick to it. But I really hope, in a way, that she won’t want to write (thought Mr. Abbott) because this place is delightful—simply charming—and if Barbara starts writing about our neighbors, we shall most probably have to leave Wandlebury—just as she had