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The Lilac Fairy Book
Edited by Andrew Lang
Preface
'What cases are you engaged in at present?' 'Are you stopping
many teeth just now?' 'What people have you converted lately?'
Do ladies put these questions to the men--lawyers, dentists,
clergymen, and so forth--who happen to sit next them at
dinner parties?
I do not know whether ladies thus indicate their interest in the
occupations of their casual neighbours at the hospitable board.
But if they do not know me, or do not know me well, they
generally ask 'Are you writing anything now?' (as if they should
ask a painter 'Are you painting anything now?' or a lawyer 'Have
you any cases at present?'). Sometimes they are more definite and
inquire 'What are you writing now?' as if I must be writing
something--which, indeed, is the case, though I dislike being
reminded of it. It is an awkward question, because the fair being
does not care a bawbee what I am writing; nor would she be much
enlightened if I replied 'Madam, I am engaged on a treatise
intended to prove that Normal is prior to Conceptional Totemism'-
-though that answer would be as true in fact as obscure in
significance. The best plan seems to be to answer that I have
entirely abandoned mere literature, and am contemplating a book
on 'The Causes of Early Blight in the Potato,' a melancholy
circumstance which threatens to deprive us of our chief esculent
root. The inquirer would never be undeceived. One nymph who, like
the rest, could not keep off the horrid topic of my occupation,
said 'You never write anything but fairy books, do you?' A French
gentleman, too, an educationist and expert in portraits of Queen
Mary, once sent me a newspaper article in which he had written
that I was exclusively devoted to the composition of fairy books,
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Fairytales 
