agement of a substantial sort with
Messrs. Pittman, Pitt & Sanderson, of Ludgate Hill, which
was a well-known explanation of the fact that this
brilliant author clung, in the main, to a rather
old-fashioned firm of publishers when the dimensions of
his reputation gave him a proportionate choice. It
explained also the circumstance that Mr. Jasper's notable
critical acumen was very often at the service of his
friend Mr. Pitt--Mr. Pittman was dead, as at least one
member of a London publishing firm is apt to be--in cases
where manuscripts of any curiously distinctive character,
from unknown authors, puzzled his perception of the truly
expedient thing to do. Mr. Arthur Rattray, of the
_Illustrated Age_, had personal access to Mr. Pitt, and
had succeeded in confusing him very much indeed as to
the probable success of a book by an impressionistic
young lady friend of his, which he called "An Adventure
in Stage-Land," and which Mr. Rattray declared to have
every element of unconventional interest. Mr. Pitt
distrusted unconventional interest, distrusted
impressionistic literature, and especially distrusted
books by young lady friends. Rattray, nevertheless showed
a suspicious indifference to its being accepted, and an
irritating readiness to take it somewhere else, and Mr.
Pitt knew Rattray for a sagacious man. And so it happened
that, returning late from a dinner where he had taken
refuge from being bored entirely-to extinction in two or
three extremely indigestible, dishes, Mr. George Jasper
found Elfrida's manuscript in a neat, thick, oblong paper
parcel, waiting for him on his dressing-table. He felt
himself particularly wide awake, and he had a consciousness
that the evening had made a very small inroad upon his
capacity for saying clever things. So he went over "An
Adventure in Stage-Land" at once, and in writing his
opinion of it to Mr. Pitt, which he did with some
elaboration, a couple of hours later, he had all the
relief of a revenge upon a well-meaning hostess, without
the reproach of having done her the slightest harm. It
is probable that if Mr. Jasper had known that the opinion
of the firm's "reader" was to find its way to the author,
he would have expressed himself in terms of more guarded
commonplace, for we cannot believe that he still cherished
a sufficiently lively resentment at having his hand
publicly kissed by a pretty girl to do otherwise; but
Mr. Pitt had not thought it necessary to tell him of thi