“Certainly put your name,” said Mrs. Wise, who was reading the letter over and over again with cheeks quite pink with pleasure and pride.
[298]
]Weenie on the staircase laughed shrilly. “Oh, she can’t, mother,” she said. “Dolly Conway, Dolly Conway,—why, it sounds as silly as anything. Look how different Charles Dickens and Emma Jane Worboise and Charlotte Yonge sound! Dolly’s isn’t a proper-sounding name.”
“I put ‘Dorothy R. Conway,’” Dolly said. “I think it sounds as right as anything—doesn’t it, Phyl? Oh, I can see it quite plainly—in little gold letters, and written slantingly. Oh, I do hope they won’t print it straight—and not red covers or blue. I must have that lovely sage-green—on brown Russian leather, Phyl, like the little Tennyson. Oh, I must have it in Russian leather. I think I’ll write at once.”
“I don’t like Dorothy R.,” objected Clif, “it’s got a Yankee sound,—Silas H. Wiggins, Hiram T. Moneybags.”
But Dolly’s ear found Dorothy Conway too plain, and Dorothy Rankin Conway too important, so she clung to the intermediate R.
“But, I say,” said Richie the practical, “how much shall you get? He asked you to tell how much.”
“Yes,” said Dolly, “we’ll have to think of that. How much should you say, mother?”
But Mrs. Wise was as ignorant as any of them as to book values. “How long did it take you to write it?” she said. “You might arrive at an idea of its value to you in that way.”
Dolly tried to calculate. “I began it on my birthday,” [299] ]she said. “I felt I would try to do something big that day. Then every day I kept writing a little at it for ever so many weeks,—about eight. And then it got hard, and I couldn’t do it, and it all seemed stupid, and I threw it behind the piano, and it stayed there for long enough. And then, one day, I was dusting the room, and I knocked Alf’s portrait over, and it fell behind too, so Davey and I had to pull the piano out, and I found the story, and it all seemed easy to go on with, and I finished it in about a week.”
“Say two months, then,” said Mrs. Wise.