it was hardly wise of the
confidential clerk to choose this peaceful moment to speak about our
author's book. "I suppose we shall print a thousand?" he said. "Five
thousand!" ejaculated the publisher. What was he thinking about? Was
he filling up an imaginary income-tax statement, or was he trying to
estimate the number of butterflies that seemed to float in the amber
shadows of the room? The clerk did not know. "I suppose you mean one
thousand, sir?" he said gently. The publisher was now wide awake. He
had lost all his butterflies, and he was not the man to allow himself
to be sleepy in the afternoon. "I said five thousand!" The clerk bit
his lip and left the room.

The author never heard of this brief dialogue; probably if he had
been present he would have missed its significance. He would never
have connected it with the flood of paragraphs that appeared in the
Press announcing that the acumen of the publisher had discovered a
new author of genius--paragraphs wherein he was compared with
Dickens, Thackeray, Flaubert, Richardson, Sir Walter Besant, Thomas
Browne, and the author of "An Englishwoman's Love-letters." As it
was, it did not occur to him to wonder why the publisher should spend
so much money on advertising a book of which he had seemed to have
but a half-hearted appreciation. After all it was his book, and the
author felt that it was only natural that as the hour of publication
drew near the world of letters should show signs of a dignified
excitement.

III. The Critic Errant

There are some emotions so intimate that the most intrepid writer
hesitates to chronicle them lest it should be inferred that he
himself is in the confessional. We have endeavoured to show our
author as a level-headed English-man with his nerves well under
control and an honest contempt for emotionalism in the stronger sex;
but his feelings in the face of the first little bundle of reviews
sent him by the press-cutting agency would prove this portrait
incomplete. He noticed with a vague astonishment that the flimsy
scraps of paper were trembling in his fingers like banknotes in the
hands of a gambler, and he laid them down on the breakfast-table in
disgust of the feminine weakness. This unmistakable proof that he had
written a book, a real book, made him at once happy and uneasy. These
fragments of smudged prints were his passport into a new and
delightful world; they were, it might be said, the name of his