fact that neither could claim
sole proprietorship? What would be John's sensation, should any one say
to him: 'Mr. ----, I have just been reading your wife's last article;
capital thing!' and, _vice versa_, imagine the same thing said of me.
Could I preserve amiability under such circumstances, and would not the
result be, a divorce in a year, and a furious lawsuit as to the
ownership of the copyright? John certainly is magnanimous, I thought,
but no one cares for divided honors, and there is that middle-aged
relation of his, with a figure like a vinegar cruet, and a voice as acid
as its contents, who never comes here for a day without doing her best
to set us by the ears, and who, in the beginning of our married life,
when we did not understand each other quite so well as now, sometimes
succeeded, to her intense satisfaction.

How she would go about among all the friends and relations, pulling the
poor articles to pieces, giving all the fine bits to John and the
rubbish to me, and hinting generally that my pretensions to authorship
were all very well, but that every one knew John did the work and I
looked out for the credit.

Here I paused. I had been successfully engaged in the pursuit of
trouble, and had conjured up so irritating a picture, that actually a
small tear had left its source, and was running over the bridge of my
nose!

'John,' I said, 'notwithstanding that I never did know how to begin
anything in an effective way, I am still determined to write, and you
must help me.'

Then I opened my heart to him, and told him my plan, and the imagined
tribulation it had given me in the last ten minutes.

'There are too many writers already, Helen,' he said; 'every man who
cannot see his way clear through life--every woman who fancies herself
misunderstood and unappreciated, worries out a book or poem or a set of
essays, to picture their individual wrongs and sufferings, and bores
every publisher of every magazine and paper of which they have ever
heard, till he is tormented into printing, or dies of manuscript on the
brain. I tell you, Helen, we do our share in aggravating the people we
meet daily, without tormenting an innocent man, 'who never did us any
harm;' and I for one, don't want an extra sin on my conscience.
Moreover, I am afraid it would spoil you, should you happen to succeed.
Have you forgotten your old friend Angelina Hobbs? One article ruined
her for life. Until that poem got into print and was