The Californians by Gertrude Atherton

It was a week before she squarely faced the relation of Henry James to her own ambitions. Then she admitted it in so many words: she could not write, she never could write. The writers who were dust had inspired her to emulation; it took a great contemporary to bring her despair. It is only the living enemies we fear; the dead and their past are beautiful unrealities to the smarting ego.

Magdalena realised for the first time the exact value she had placed upon the art of expression, -- a value that was in inverse ratio to her limitations. Literature to her was, above all else, the art of words. Stories were to be picked up anywhere: had she not found a number ready to her hand? The creative faculty might, in its unique development, be something supremer still, although crippled without the perfected medium of this writer, who seemed above all writers to be the master and not the servant of words. She re-read her own efforts. They represented the hard thought and work of six years; not a great span, perhaps, but long enough to determine the promise of a faculty. The stories were wooden. Her work would always be wooden. There was not a phrase to delight the cultivated reader, not a line that any moderately clever person, given the same material, might not have written. After as many more years of labour she might become a praiseworthy writer of the third rank.