as the hall-mark of literary
merit. He had no illusions as to its possible success, but, on the
other hand, he knew that he could not lose any money on it, so he
wrote a letter to the author inviting him to an interview.

As soon as he had read the letter the author told himself that he
had been certain all along that his book would be accepted.
Nevertheless, he went to the interview moved by certain emotional
flutterings against which circumstance had guarded him ever since
his boyhood. He found this mild excitation of the nervous system by
no means unpleasant. It was like digesting a new and subtle liqueur
that made him light-footed and tingled in the tips of his fingers.
He recalled a phrase that had greatly pleased him in the early days
of his novel. "As the sun colours flowers, so Art colours life." It
seemed to him that this was beginning to come true, and that life
was already presenting itself to him in a gayer, brighter dress. He
reached the publisher's office, therefore, in an unwontedly
receptive mood, and was tremendously impressed by the rudeness of
the clerks, who treated authors as mendicants and expressed their
opinion of literature by handling books as if they were bundles of
firewood.

The publisher looked at him under heavy eyelids, recognised his
position in the social scale, and reflected with satisfaction that
his acquaintances could be relied on to purchase at least a hundred
copies. The interview did not at all take the lines that the author
in his innocence had expected, and in a surprisingly short space of
time he found himself bowed out, with the duplicate of a contract in
the pocket of his overcoat. In the outer office the confidential
clerk took him in hand and led him to the door of an enormous cellar,
lit by electricity and filled from one end to the other with bales
and heaps of books. "Books!" said the confidential clerk, with the
smile of a gamekeeper displaying his hand-reared pheasants. "There
are a great many," the author said timidly.

"Of course, we do not keep our stock here," the clerk explained.
"These are just samples." It was sometimes necessary to remind
inexperienced writers that the publication of their first book was
only a trivial incident in the history of a great publishing house.
The author had a sad vision of his novel as a little brick in a
monstrous pyramid built of books, and the clerk mentally decided that
he was not the kind of man to turn up every day at th