To me, nothing could have been more perfect. Here was a job that lay within my capabilities—even I understood it perfectly—and where I was quite alone, saved from all the trials and difficulties that being amongst other people entailed. In the room next door there was a sink and a jug which, once I obtained tea and coffee and milk and biscuits, even allowed me to avoid tea and meal breaks. I was truly alone, my task clear before me, no one to get in my way. It might have had some drawbacks but I knew I had discovered my vocation. To work completely alone, on a task that was all mine and no one else’s, by my own methods, in my own time. With a smile, I began work right away.

We seek him here,
We seek him there,
Those Frenchies seek him everywhere.
Is he is heaven?
Is he in hell?
That demmed elusive Pimpernel.
  The Scarlet Pimpernel was an elusive fellow indeed. To begin with, he seems to get clean away with a role that would better suit a villain—an Englishman who rescues French aristocrats from Madame Guillotine. But what else would you expect a Baroness to write? Well, to be brutal, I never really liked it, nor its pompous hero, and found the writing stiff and facile. In I Will Repay, which purports to be another of his adventures, he remains completely out of sight or mind until page 159, less than 50 pages from the end of the book. And even then he is obscurely in the background, offering a little advice and then disappearing again until he helps out in the climatic scenes. Never did a hero have to do so little to justify his heroism.