Mary had come a long way since the days when she gave up her artistic aspirations and began to turn her storytelling powers to account in the writing of Her Evil Genius in 1877. Still some months short of her twenty-ninth birthday, and with her second novel now safely completed despite her perpetual lapses in health, she had every reason to feel pleased with herself. But still she doubted her ability. She had achieved a great deal, but she remained uncertain about the future, and in March 1888 she sent the manuscript to her cousin Edward Cholmondeley, who had given valuable advice on her previous novel. His self-mockery in the Cornhill, where he would claim to be a ‘briefless barrister’ making desultory efforts at verse because he had nothing else to do, is at odds with the painstaking commentary to which he now subjected Sir Charles. In his own account of a day spent in his Birmingham chambers, the monotony is broken only by importunate sellers of furniture polish and annotated volumes of Shakespeare; his sole correspondence turning out to be from his aunt, whose servant wants to take a lease of a cottage at Peckham, ‘Would you, like a good boy, run through the copy’. To Mary he wrote that he was ‘in a great hurry’, and had been forced to skim the last part of the manuscript because he had to go on circuit the following week. But his proofing was punctilious – he pointed out that a Frenchman should be treated to a capital F, and went through with a pencil lightly making alterations which he tactfully assured her a piece of India rubber would soon remove. He reassured her about the point of law governing Dare's marital status, and pointed out that gentlemen did not generally go riding in knickerbockers. He admired the novel more than The Danvers Jewels, finding it showed ‘more thought, more power, & in some respects more of the novelist's art’.