H. de Vere Stacpoole and Margaret Stacpoole

“ Breakfast over and cleared away, Julia, with her hair still down, set to work at the table before a pile of papers and account books. Never could you have imagined her the Julia of the other evening discoursing on literature with Bobby.
She employed no literary agent, being that rare thing, a writer with an instinct for business. When you see vast publishing houses and opulent publishers rolling in their motor cars, you behold an optical illusion. What you see, or rather what you ought to see, is a host of writers without the instinct for business. ”

“ Julia thought for a while. Then she got up to go.
“If you want my opinion,” said Tozer, “I think the whole lot want looking after. They seemed quite a pleasant party, but responsibility seemed somewhat absent. The old lady, charming though she was, seemed to me scarcely enough ballast for so much youth.”
“I understand,” said Julia. Then she went off and Tozer lit a pipe.
The pretty young French girl was troubling him. She had charmed even him, and he knew Bobby, and his wisdom indicated that a penniless beauty was not the first rung of the ladder to success in life. ”

“ Arrived at the great, impudently advertising, roaring, trading firm that dealt with books as men deal with goods in bulk and, interviewing the manager as man to man, she had driven her bargain, and a good one, too. ”