The Young Visiters

The Young Visiters or, Mr.
Salteena's Plan, by

Daisy Ashford This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost
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Title: The Young Visiters or, Mr. Salteena's Plan
Author: Daisy Ashford
Release Date: May 11, 2007 [EBook #21415]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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[Illustration: THE AUTHOR]
THE YOUNG VISITERS OR, MR SALTEENA'S PLAN
BY

DAISY ASHFORD
WITH A PREFACE BY J. M. BARRIE
NEW YORK GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
Copyright, 1919, By George H. Doran Company
Printed in the United States of America

[Pg v] PREFACE
The "owner of the copyright" guarantees that "The Young Visiters" is
the unaided effort in fiction of an authoress of nine years. "Effort,"
however, is an absurd word to use, as you may see by studying the
triumphant countenance of the child herself, which is here reproduced
as frontispiece to her sublime work. This is no portrait of a writer who
had to burn the oil at midnight (indeed there is documentary evidence
that she was hauled off to bed every evening at six): it has an air of
careless power; there is a complacency about it that by the severe might
perhaps be called smugness. It needed no effort for that face to knock
off a masterpiece. It probably represents precisely how she looked
when she finished a chapter. When she was actually at work I think the
expression [Pg vi] was more solemn, with the tongue firmly clenched
between the teeth; an unholy rapture showing as she drew near her love
chapter. Fellow-craftsmen will see that she is looking forward to this
chapter all the time.
The manuscript is in pencil in a stout little note book (twopence), and
there it has lain for years, for though the authoress was nine when she
wrote it she is now a grown woman. It has lain, in lavender as it were,
in the dumpy note book, waiting for a publisher to ride that way and
rescue it; and here he is at last, not a bit afraid that to this age it may
appear "Victorian." Indeed if its pictures of High Life are accurate (as
we cannot doubt, the authoress seems always so sure of her facts) they
had a way of going on in those times which is really surprising. Even
the grand historical figures were free and easy, such as King Edward,

of whom we have perhaps the most human picture ever penned, as he
appears at a levée "rather sumshiously," in a "small [Pg vii] but costly
crown," and afterwards slips away to tuck into ices. It would seem in
particular that we are oddly wrong in our idea of the young Victorian
lady as a person more shy and shrinking than the girl of to-day. The
Ethel of this story is a fascinating creature who would have a good time
wherever there were a few males, but no longer could she voyage
through life quite so jollily without attracting the attention of the
censorious. Chaperon seems to be one of the very few good words of
which our authoress had never heard.
The lady she had grown into, the "owner of the copyright" already
referred to, gives me a few particulars of this child she used to be, and
is evidently a little scared by her. We should probably all be a little
scared (though proud) if that portrait was dumped down in front of us
as ours, and we were asked to explain why we once thought so much of
ourselves as that.
Except for the smirk on her face, all I can learn of her now is that she
was one of [Pg viii] a small family who lived in the country, invented
their own games, dodged the governess and let the rest of the world go
hang. She read everything that came her way, including, as the context
amply proves, the grown-up novels of the period. "I adored writing and
used to pray for bad weather, so that I need not go out but could stay in
and write." Her mother used to have early tea in bed; sometimes
visitors came to the house, when there was talk of events in high
society: there was mention of places called Hampton Court, the Gaiety
Theatre and the "Crystale" Palace. This is almost all that is now
remembered, but it was enough for the blazing child. She sucked her
thumb for a moment (this is guesswork), and