The review she read was in a paper whose editor would not have admitted it had he suspected the drift which the reviewer had failed to see; and the passages quoted appealed to Alexa in virtue, partly, of her not seeing half they involved, or anything whatever of the said drift. But because he had got a book published, and because she approved of certain lines, phrases and passages in it; but chiefly because it had been praised by more than one influential paper, Andrew rose immensely in Alexa's opinion. Although he was the son of a tenant, was even a laborer on his farm, and had covered a birth no higher than that of Jesus Christ with the gown of no university, she began, against her own sense of what was fit, to look up to the plow-man. The plow-man was not aware of this, and would have been careless had he been. He respected his landlord's daughter, not ever questioned her superiority as a lady where he made no claim to being a gentleman, but he recognized in her no power either to help or to hurt.
When they next met, Alexa was no longer indifferent to his presence, and even made a movement in the direction of being agreeable to him. She dropped in a measure, without knowing she had ever used it, her patronizing carriage, but had the assurance to compliment him not merely on the poem he had written, but on the way it had been received; she could not have credited, had he told her, that he was as indifferent to the praise or blame of what is called the public, as if that public were indeed—what it is most like—a boy just learning to read. Yet it is the consent of such a public that makes the very essence of what is called fame. How should a man care for it who knows that he is on his way to join his peers, to be a child with the great ones of the earth, the lovers of the truth, the Doers of the Will. What to him will be the wind of the world he has left behind, a wind that can not arouse the dead, that can only blow about the grave-clothes of the dead as they bury their dead.
“Live, Dawtie,” said Andrew to the girl, “and ane day ye'll hae yer hert's desire; for 'Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness.'”
Andrew was neither annoyed nor gratified with the compliments Alexa paid him, for she did not know the informing power of the book—what he cared for in it—the thing that made him write it. But her gentleness and kindness did please him; he was glad to feel a little at home with her, glad to draw a little nearer to one who had never been other than good to him. And then was she not more than kind, even loving to Dawtie?
“So, Andrew, you are a poet at last,” she said, holding out her hand to him, which Andrew received in a palm that wrote the better verse that it was horny. “Please to remember I was the first that found you out!” she added.
“I think it was my mother,” answered Andrew.
“And I would have helped you if you would have let me.”
“It is not well, ma'am, to push the bird off because he can't sit safe on the edge of the nest.”
“Perhaps you are right A failure then would have stood in the way of your coming fame.”
“Oh, for that, ma'am, believe me, I do not care a short straw.”