Romantic Rebel Read Free Page A

buy a gallon of paint. In my heart I knew no hero dwelt within those walls.
    The exterior alerted me not to expect anything in the way of grandeur, or even much of respectability, inside. It was a dusty, rambling, ramshackle building, with a flock of dirty urchins darting about the halls. One door stood open, and a little white-haired gnome of a man in spectacles, wearing a blue jacket with the elbows worn shiny, peered out.
    “You’d be Miss Nesbitt, then?” he enquired in an accent from the east side of London.
    “Yes, I’m looking for Mr. Pepper.”
    “You’ve found him. Come in, come in. Don’t mind the dirt.”
    With sinking heart I entered his squalid office, Annie clutching my elbow. We stared around with wide eyes, as if we were at a raree-show. He had a battered old desk, piled high with papers, a chair behind it, and another chair in front. The walls were grimed with age and dust. No picture enlivened the vast expanse of grayish-yellow paint. There were not only rolls of dust, but actually pebbles on the carpet, along with a wizened rind of orange and some strange black pellets, which I originally took for the droppings of a rabbit, but eventually discovered to come from his pipe.
    “Sit yourselves down,” he offered, and wheeled his own chair out for Annie. I sat in the other, and very nearly fell off. One leg was short, but he jammed a book under it and it stopped jiggling. Mr. Pepper, my hero, leaned against the desk and smiled, while examining me closely.
    “I’d a notion you’d be a deal older, and uglier,” he said.
    All I could think of to reply was “Oh.” He certainly excelled my expectations on both counts. I presented Annie, who was rigid with disapproval.
    “Not that it matters,” he assured me. “You have the gift, and that’s all I’m after. A fine, impassioned piece of prose you sent me, Miss Nesbitt. I’m ready to take anything else of the sort you have to offer.”
    This, at least, was what I had hoped to hear, and I began to recover. “I brought a few things with me.” I opened my folio and handed him the two essays residing there. One was on the arrival of autumn in the country, with florid descriptions of changing colors and some analogy to life’s passage. The other was a brief history and description of the old Perpendicular Church in Milverton, which has some fine wood carvings.
    He glanced at them briefly and looked at me, bewildered. “But these are pap,” he said simply.
    “What do you mean? They are elegant descriptions of...”
    “This isn’t the sort of thing I publish at all, Miss Nesbitt. Your other piece, now, that was more like it. There are half a dozen magazines putting out this sort of drivel. I print a few of them. Not publish, mind, but print. This building is an old printer’s workshop. I began my business doing the printing work for books and magazines. I came to realize the better blunt was in publishing, so I’ve hired a few sharp pens and began publishing my Ladies’ Journal some years back. It’s a comer, Miss Nesbitt, aimed at ladies like yourself, who want more from life than to be chained to a stove, rearing children. I thought from your article you were a modern, enlightened lady.”
    My hackles rose gently and I said, “I am.”
    He hopped up on the edge of his desk and with feet dangling from incredibly short legs, he smiled down at me. “I saw in you the logical successor to Mary Wollstonecraft—the lady who wrote The Vindication of the Rights of Women in the last century. There is a beacon waiting to be taken up, Missie, and a fortune for the lady who has the wits to grab it. There is a growing legion of women like yourself, fed up with being treated as ladies.”
    This was hardly the way I would have described my views, but I listened avidly. Having burned my bridge behind me, I had little choice. When he shoved a magazine under my nose, I felt myself slipping back into my dream world. It was the October issue of The Ladies’