But with Mrs. Launce there was no
definite attempt at either one thing or the other--she was so busily
engaged in the matter in hand, so absorbed and interested, that the things
that her face might be doing never occurred to her. Her hair was drawn back
and parted down the middle. She liked to wear little straw coal-scuttle
bonnets; she was very fond of blue silk, and her frocks had an inclination
to trail. On her mother's side she was French and on her father's English;
from her mother she got the technique of her stories, the light-hearted
boldness of her conversation and her extraordinary devotion to her family.
She was always something of a puzzle to English women because she was a
great deal more domestic than most of them and yet bristled with theories
about morals and life in general that had nothing whatever in common with
domesticity. Some one once said of her that "she was a hot water bottle
playing at being a bomb...."
She belonged to all the London worlds, although she found perhaps especial
pleasure in the society of her fellow writers. This was largely because
she loved, beyond everything else, the business side of her profession.
There was nothing at all that she did not know about the publishing and
distribution of a novel. Her capacity for remembering other people's prices
was prodigious and she managed her agent and her publisher with a deftness
that left them gasping.
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