teran Novelist sank again into his chair in the posture in
which she had surprised him.

XIX

A SEARCH FOR CELEBRITY

We lately received a publication which has interested us somewhat out of
proportion to its size. It is called _The Way into Print_, but it does
not treat, as the reader might rashly suppose, of the best method of
getting your name into the newspapers, either as a lady who is giving a
dinner to thirteen otherwise unknown persons, or is making a coming-out
tea for her debutante daughter, or had a box full of expensively
confectioned friends at the opera or the vaudeville, or is going to read
a paper at a woman's club, or is in any sort figuring in the thousand
and one modern phases of publicity; it does not even advise her guests
or hearers how to appear among those present, or those who were invited
and did not come, or those who would not have come if they had been
invited. Its scope is far more restricted, yet its plane is infinitely
higher, its reach incomparably further. The Print which it proposes to
lead the Way into is that print where the elect, who were once few and
are now many, are making the corridors of time resound to their
footsteps, as poets, essayists, humorists, or other literary forms of
immortality. Their procession, which from the point of the impartial
spectator has been looking more and more like a cake-walk in these later
years, is so increasingly the attraction of young-eyed ambition that
nothing interests a very large class of people more than advice for the
means of joining it, and it is this advice which the publication in
point supplies: supplies, we must say, with as much good sense and good
feeling as is consistent with an office which does not seem so dignified
as we could wish.

Inevitably the adviser must now and then stoop to the folly of the
aspirant, inevitably he must use that folly from time to time with
wholesome severity, but he does not feel himself equal to the work
unaided. Our sudden national expansion, through the irresistible force
of our imaginative work, into an intellectual world-power has thrust a
responsibility upon the veterans of a simpler time which they may not
shirk, and the author of _The Way into Print_ calls upon them to share
his task. He is not satisfied with the interesting chapters contributed
by younger authors who are in the act of winning their spurs, but he
appeals to those established in the public recognition to do their par