Mr. Potts was thin and angular. He smiled occasionally; not all at once—it might be said in sections—the smile moving from one feature to another, like sunlight on a picket fence. Mr. Potts was not a hard-hearted man and as he looked at the dainty little woman before him, the thought came to him: “What if she were my daughter and some other man stood in my place, under similar circumstances?”
“Do you not see, Miss Caswell, that that ‘that’ should be a ‘than’ instead of that ‘that’?”
“Oh, yes,” she said, “it ought to be ‘than,’” and she turned over quickly some galley-slips which lay beside her.
“Well,” she said, “the author did not see it.”
“I should think, Miss Caswell, that you had been a proof-reader long enough to have learned that an author never sees anything,” said Mr. Potts, contemptuously. “They are too busy with ideas to think of such minor matters as spelling, punctuation, and grammar.”
“That’s true of Mr. Stowell,” said Miss Caswell, “and such writing, too, but his books sell.”
“We have made him,” said Mr. Potts, his chest swelling. “He was an unknown author, but we made his first book go.”
“And he has been a go ever since,” said Miss Caswell, laughing.
“Yes, and when Mr. Smythe rejected one of his books he took it to another house and they are getting the benefit of all our advertising.”
“Well, you could not expect him to throw his manuscript into the ash-heap,” remarked Miss Caswell.