ready sale.
Wherever she went, she says, she "found people laughing or crying over
it, and was continually told how well it was going, how much it was
liked, how fine a thing I had done." The first edition was exhausted
in a week. An entire edition was ordered by London publishers. She was
very well satisfied with the reception of "Moods" at the time, though
in after years when fifty thousand copies of a book would be printed
as a first edition, the sale of "Moods" seemed to her inconsiderable.

The present day reader wonders neither at the eagerness of the public
for the book, nor at the criticisms that were freely made upon it. It
is interesting from cover to cover and as a study of "a life affected
by moods, not a discussion of marriage," it is effective. In spite,
however, of the warning of the author, everyone read it as "a
discussion of marriage," and few were satisfied. The interest centres
in the fortunes of a girl who has married the wrong lover, the man to
whom, by preference, she would have given her heart being supposed to
be dead. Would that he had been, for then, to all appearance, she
would have been contented and happy. Unfortunately he returns a year
too late, finds the girl married and, though endowed with every virtue
which a novelist can bestow upon her hero, he does not know enough to
leave the poor woman in peace. On the contrary, he settles down to a
deliberate siege to find out how she feels, wrings from her the
confession that she is miserable, as by that time no doubt she was,
and then convinces her that since she does not love her husband, it is
altogether wrong to live under the same roof with him. Surely this was
nobly done. Poor Sylvia loves this villain, Miss Alcott evidently
loves him, but the bloody-minded reader would like to thrust a knife
into him. However, he is not a name or a type, but a real man, or one
could not get so angry with him. All the characters live and breathe
in these pages, and no criticism was less to the purpose than that
the situations were unnatural. Miss Alcott says "The relations of
Warwick, Moor, and Sylvia are pronounced impossible; yet a case of the
sort exists, and a woman came and asked me how I knew it. I did not
know or guess, but perhaps felt it, without any other guide, and
unconsciously put the thing into my book."

Everyone will agree that Miss Alcott had earned a vacation, and it
came in 1865, in a trip to Europe, where she spent a year, from July