e office to ask
them how they were getting on.

The author was a little dazed when he emerged into the street and the
sunshine. His book, which an hour before had seemed the most
important thing in the world, had, become almost insignificant in the
light of that vast collection of printed matter, and in some subtle
way he felt that he had dwindled with it. The publisher had praised
it without enthusiasm and had not specified any of its merits; he had
not even commented on his fantastic use of the colon. The author had
lived with it now for many months--it had become a part of his
personality, and he felt that he had betrayed himself in delivering
it into the hands of strangers who could not understand it. He had
the reticence of the well-bred Englishman, and though he told himself
reassuringly that his novel in no way reflected his private life, he
could not quite overcome the sentiment that it was a little vulgar to
allow alien eyes to read the product of his most intimate thoughts.
He had really been shocked at the matter-of-fact way in which every
one at the office had spoken of his book, and the sight of all the
other books with which it would soon be inextricably confused had
emphasised the painful impression. This all seemed to rob the
author's calling of its presumed distinction, and he looked at the
men and women who passed him on the pavement, and wondered whether
they too had written books.

This mood lasted for some weeks, at the end of which time he received
the proofs, which he read and re-read with real pleasure before
setting himself to correcting them with meticulous care. He performed
this task with such conscientiousness, and made so many minor
alterations--he changed most of those flighty colons to more
conventional semicolons--that the confidential clerk swore terribly
when he glanced at the proofs before handing them to a boy, with
instructions to remove three-quarters of the offending emendations.
A week or two later there happened one of those strange little
incidents that make modern literary history. It was a bright, sunny
afternoon; the publisher had been lunching with the star author of
the firm, a novelist whose books were read wherever the British flag
waved and there was a circulating library to distribute them, and
now, in the warm twilight of the lowered blinds he was enjoying
profound thoughts, delicately tinted by burgundy and old port. The
shrewdest men make mistakes, and certainly