"Is that likely?" he asked, referring to the last condition. It made the business far more thrilling.
He had the common sense, however, to see that she was already doubtful of her wisdom: so that as soon as volume and loose sheets were in his hand, he changed the subject tactfully.
"Well," he asked, "and how is the new book going?"
"Oh, isn't it awful?" Helena replied. "I don't know if I ought to tell you, but it's not sold at all: not, I mean, except those sold before publication and I never understand quite how that happens."
"Then I expect it's good," said Geoffrey Alison a trifle cheaply.
Helena replied with emphasis, as though rebutting a grave charge. "No, not at all. That's just it: it's much worse than his other ones. He's in an awful way. I don't believe he's sold a thousand copies!"
"My dear Mrs. Brett," he said (he always hated calling her that, but he dared not embark on "Helena"), "comfort yourself with the idea that a thousand copies is a very good sale for any decent novel. Each copy, after all, is read by twenty people in these days of libraries, so that means twenty thousand readers. Of course if Hubert wrote for shop-girls, he might find a million: but do you think that any really serious study of real life—the sort of book that simply gets at character and doesn't fuss with plot: the real, artistic novel—is going to find more than twenty thousand people in dull old England who can understand it? And that's your thousand-copy sale! I don't mind betting no really 'artistic' novel—it's a beastly word—ever sells more than that."
His one idea in all this had been to console her, for he guessed a little what it meant when Hubert Brett was "in an awful way"; but now she seemed if anything more troubled. She sat in dazed silence, looking like a small child who has seen something which it absolutely cannot understand at all.
"But Wandering Stars," she said presently, "I've often heard, sold quite five thousand."
"Oh yes, I dare say," came the unthinking answer. Had she forgotten about her MS.?