The yellow book: an illustrated quarterly (13.1897)

Two Prose Fancies

By Richard Le Gallienne

I—Sleeping Beauty

urpvERY woman is a sleeping beauty,” I said, sententiously.

rj “ Only some need more waking than others ? ” replied my

cynical friend.

“ Yes, some will only awaken at the kiss of great love or great
genius, which are not far from the same thing,” I replied.

“ I see,” said the gay editor with whom I was talking.

Our conversation was of certain authors of our acquaintance, and
how they managed their inspiration, of what manner were their
muses, and what the methods of their stimulus. Some, we had
noted, throve on constancy, to others inconstancy was the
lawless law of their being; and so accepted had become these
indispensable conditions of their literary activity that the wives
had long since ceased to be jealous of the other wives. To a
household dependent on poetry, constancy in many cases would
mean poverty, and certain good literary wives had been known to
rate their husbands with a lazy and unproductive faithfulness. The
editor sketched a tragic manage known to him, where the husband,
a lyric poet of fame, had become so chronically devoted to his
despairing wife that destitution stared them in the face. It was