"No, I'm sorry to say—"
"Nay, don't be sorry; that lack may save it from the waste-basket." Then my heart spoke. "Ah! madam, if you had only done what no woman seems to have seen the importance of doing—written the women's side of that awful war—"
"That's just what I have done," she interrupted.
"I was a Union woman, in the Confederacy. I couldn't talk; I had to write. I was in the siege of Vicksburg from beginning to end."
"Leave your manuscript with me," I said. "If, on examining it, I find I can recommend it to a publisher, I will do so. But remember what I have already told you—the passage of an unknown writer's work through an older author's hands is of no benefit to it whatever. It is a bad sign rather than a good one. Your chances of acceptance will be at least no less if you send this to the publishers yourself."
No, she would like me to intervene.
How my attorney friend and I took a two days' journey by rail, reading the manuscript to each other in the Pullman car; how a young newly married couple next us across the aisle, pretending not to notice, listened with all their might; how my friend the attorney now and then stopped to choke down tears; and how the young stranger opposite came at last, with apologies, asking where this matter would be published and under what title, I need not tell. At length I was intercessor for a manuscript that publishers would not lightly decline. I bought it for my little museum of true stories, at a price beyond what I believe any magazine would have paid—an amount that must have filled the widow's heart with joy, but as certainly was not beyond its worth to me. I have already contributed a part of this manuscript to "The Century" as one of its "Wax-papers." But by permission it is restored here to its original place.
Judge Farrar, with whom I enjoyed a slight but valued acquaintance, stopped me one day in Carondelet street, New Orleans, saying, "I have a true story that I want you to tell. You can dress it out—"
I arrested him with a shake of the head. "Dress me no dresses. Story me no stories. There's not one of a hundred of them that does not lack something essential, for want of which they are good for naught. Keep them for after-dinner chat; but for the novelist they are good to smell, not to eat. And yet—tell me your story. I have a use for it—a cabinet of true things that have never had and shall not have a literary tool lifted up against them; virgin shells from the beach of the sea of human events. It may be I shall find a place for it there." So he told me the true story which I have called "Attalie Brouillard," because, having forgotten the woman's real name, it pleased his fancy to use that name in recounting the tale: "Attalie Brouillard." I repeated the story to a friend, a gentleman of much reading.
His reply dismayed me. "I have a faint impression," he said, "that you will find something very much like that in one of Lever's novels."