“Please do not say anything more about that, and when we find him, we will see what he has to say about it himself.”
“It’s awful to write books for a livin’. It jest seems to me I’d die.”
“Why?” asked Blanche.
“La me, I couldn’t live and not have a chance to talk to anybody.”
“I believe it,” said Blanche.
“Why, it jest seems to me it must be awful to sit all 161 day and think. Why, I’d ruther wash every day in the week.”
“Every one has his taste,” said Blanche, “and play becomes work when monotony steps in; but gaining a living by the pen is by no means play. It has its toil, and also its charms. There are hours when it is only a beautiful pastime, and there are hours of the most incessant toil. It is neither all pleasure nor all pain.”
“Well, for my part I wouldn’t never want to be a writer. I never see one afore, and I always thought it was something awful nice, but, la me, I never would want to tear my brains to pieces in that way.”
Blanche arose and looked out of the window. The evening was coming on, and the street lamps were just beginning to light up the city. Shop girls, with white, tired faces, men and women of toil, even children, worn and weary, were hurrying along through the cold. Everything looked like toil to Blanche Elsworth at that moment. What a long, long weary round of toil she had just completed. Her first novel had been set afloat upon the world to fall into the hands of the lover of fiction or to be scanned by the scathing eye of the critic. She remembered how, when she started, that looking before her it seemed like a long lane that had no turn. How would she ever reach the end? she had thought. Could she? Others had, but had they the difficulties to overcome that she had? She did not believe they had, but she would try it at least. She had published several small books of poems, but the work on which she was about to start out was so much broader, so much more toilsome.