ngs a leak, what would you do?

He looked me straight in the eyes for about half a minute.--If I heard
the pumps going, I'd look and see whether they were gaining on the leak
or not. If they were gaining I'd stay where I was.--Go and find out
what's the matter with that young woman.

I had noticed that the Young Girl--the storywriter, our Scheherezade, as
I called her--looked as if she had been crying or lying awake half the
night. I found on asking her,--for she is an honest little body and is
disposed to be confidential with me for some reason or other,--that she
had been doing both.

--And what was the matter now, I questioned her in a semi-paternal kind
of way, as soon as I got a chance for a few quiet words with her.

She was engaged to write a serial story, it seems, and had only got as
far as the second number, and some critic had been jumping upon it, she
said, and grinding his heel into it, till she couldn't bear to look at
it. He said she did not write half so well as half a dozen other young
women. She did n't write half so well as she used to write herself. She
hadn't any characters and she had n't any incidents. Then he went
to work to show how her story was coming out, trying to anticipate
everything she could make of it, so that her readers should have nothing
to look forward to, and he should have credit for his sagacity in
guessing, which was nothing so very wonderful, she seemed to think.
Things she had merely hinted and left the reader to infer, he told right
out in the bluntest and coarsest way. It had taken all the life out of
her, she said. It was just as if at a dinner-party one of the guests
should take a spoonful of soup and get up and say to the company, "Poor
stuff, poor stuff; you won't get anything better; let's go somewhere
else where things are fit to eat."

What do you read such things for, my dear? said I.

The film glistened in her eyes at the strange sound of those two soft
words; she had not heard such very often, I am afraid.

--I know I am a foolish creature to read them, she answered,--but I
can't help it; somebody always sends me everything that will make me
wretched to read, and so I sit down and read it, and ache all over for
my pains, and lie awake all night.

--She smiled faintly as she said this, for she saw the sub-ridiculous
side of it, but the film glittered still in her eyes. There are a good
many real miseries in life that we cannot help smiling at, but they are