The Celebrity at Home
The Celebrity at Home
BY VIOLET HUNT
AUTHOR OF ‘A HARD WOMAN’
FOURTH EDITION
LONDON
CHAPMAN AND HALL, Ld.
1904
CHAPTER: I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII, XIII, XIV, XV, XVI, XVII, XVIII, XIX, XX, XXI.
Tempe, a valley in Thessaly, between Mount Olympus at the north, andOssa at the south, through which the river Peneus flows into theÆgean.—Lemprière.
THE CELEBRITY AT HOME
CHAPTER I
THEY say that a child’s childhood is the happiest time of its life!
Mine isn’t.
For it is nice to do as you like even if it isn’t good for you. It isnice to overeat yourself even though it does make you ill afterwards. Itis a positive pleasure to go out and do something that catches you acold, if you want to, and to leave off your winter clothes a month toosoon. Children hate feeling “stuffy”—no grown-up person understandsthat feeling that makes you wriggle and twist till you get sent to bed.It is nice to go to bed when you are sleepy, and no sooner, not to bedespatched any time that grown-up people are tired of you and take thequickest way to get rid of a nuisance. Taken all round, the very nicestthing in the world is your own way and plenty of it, and you never getthat properly, it seems to me, until you are too old to enjoy it, or toocross to admit that you do!
I suspect that the word “rice-pudding” will be written on my heart, asCalais was on Bloody Mary’s, when I am dead.
I have got that blue shade about the eyes that they say early-dyingchildren have, and I may die young. So I am going to write downeverything, just as it happens, in my life, because when I grow up, Imean to be an author, like my father before me, and teach in song, or inprose, what I have learned in suffering. Doing this will get meinsensibly into the habit of composition. George—my father—we alwayscall him by his Christian name by request—offered to look it over forme, but I do not think that I shall avail myself of his kindness. I wantto be quite honest, and set down everything, in malice, as grown-uppeople do, and then your book is sure to be amusing. I shall say theworst—I mean the truth—about everybody, inc