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 is
nice to overeat yourself even though it does make you ill afterwards. It
is a positive pleasure to go out and do something that catches you a
cold, if you want to, and to leave off your winter clothes a month too
soon. Children hate feeling "stuffy"--no grown-up person understands
that 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 be
despatched any time that grown-up people are tired of you and take the
quickest way to get rid of a nuisance. Taken all round, the very nicest
thing in the world is your own way and plenty of it, and you never get
that properly, it seems to me, until you are too old to enjoy it, or too
cross to admit that you do!

I suspect that the word "rice-pudding" will be written on my heart, as
Calais was on Bloody Mary's, when I am dead.

I have got that blue shade about the eyes that they say early-dying
children have, and I may die young. So I am going to write down
everything, just as it happens, in my life, because when I grow up, I
mean to be an author, like my father before me, and teach in song, or in
prose, what I have learned in suffering. Doing this will get me
insensibly into the habit of composition. George--my father--we always
call him by his Christian name by request--offered to look it over for
me, but I do not think that I shall avail myself of his kindness. I want
to be quite honest, and set down everything, in malice, as grown-up
people do, and then your book is sure to be amusing. I shall say the
worst--I mean the truth--about everybody, including myself. That is what
makes a book saleable. People don't like to be put off with short
commons in scandal, and chuck the book into the fire at once as I have
seen George do, when the writer is too discreet. My book will not be
discreet, but crisp, and gossippy. Even Ariadne must not read it,
however much of my hair and its leaves she pulls out, for she will claw
me in her rage, of course. Grammar and spelling will not be made a
specialty of, because what you gain in propriety you lose in originality
and _verve_. I do adore _verve_!