The Giant's Robe

by F. Anstey

'No; mother objects to that kind of horse-exercise, and, ahem, Trixie, it might be as well to say nothing about it to any of them just at present. There will only be a fuss about it, and I can't stand that.'

Trixie promised silence. 'I'm so glad about it, though, you can't think, Mark,' she said; 'and this isn't one of your great books, either, you said, didn't you?'

'No,' said Mark; 'it's not one of them. I haven't put my best work into it.'

'You put your best work into the two that came back, didn't you?' asked Trixie naively. 'But they won't come back any more, will they? They'll be glad of them if this is a success.'

'Fladgate will be glad of them, I fancy, in any case. I've got a chance at last, Trixie. A chance at last!'

Later that night he locked himself in the room which he used as a sitting-room and bedroom combined, and set himself, not without repugnance, to go steadily through the proofs, and make the acquaintance of the work he had made his own.

Much has been said of the delight with which an author reads his first proofs, and possibly the sensation is a wholly pleasurable one to some; to others it is not without its drawbacks. Ideas that seemed vivid and bright enough when they were penned have a bald tame look in the new form in which they come back. The writer finds himself judging the work as a stranger's, and forming the worst opinions of it. He sees hideous gaps and crudities beyond all power of correction, and for the first time, perhaps, since he learned that his manuscript was accepted, his self-doubts return to him.

But Mark's feelings were much more complicated than this; all the gratified pride of an author was naturally denied to him, and it was thoroughly distasteful to him to carry out his scheme of deception by such sordid details as the necessary corrections of printers' errors.

But he was anxiously eager to find out what kind of a literary bantling was this which he had fathered so fraudulently; he had claimed it in blind reliance on the publisher's evident enthusiasm—had he made a mistake after all? What if it proved something which could do him no credit whatever—a trap into which his ambition had led him! The thought that this might be so made him very uneasy. Poor Holroyd, he thought, was a very good fellow—an excellent fellow, but not exactly the man to write a book of extraordinary merit—clever, perhaps, but clever in an unobtrusive way—and Mark's tendency was to judge, as he expected to be judged himself, by outsides.

With these misgivings crowded upon him, he sat down to read the opening chapters; he was not likely to be much overcome by admiration in any case, for his habitual attitude in studying even the greatest works was critical, as he felt the presence of eccentricities or shortcomings which he himself would have avoided.