“See if you know her,” I responded, and read out the scene. She joined in the laugh.
“To the life!” she pronounced. “Go on!”
I finished the chapter, and the two resumed their magazines. Presently Herbert tossed his aside.
“I say!” with boyish impetuosity. “This is stupid after what you gave us. Haven’t you ‘anything more of the same sort?’”
It was a slang phrase of the day.
It was the “Open Sesame” of my literary life.
They kept me reading until nearly midnight, dipping in here for a scene, there for a character-sketch, until my voice gave out.
I began rewriting Alone next day, and we welcomed stormy evenings for the next two months. When the MS. was ready for the press, I wrote the “Dedication to my Brother and Sister” as a pleasant surprise to my generous critics. They did not suspect it until they read it in print.
Getting the work into print was not so easy as the eager praises of my small audience might have inclined me to expect. The principal book-store in Richmond at that time was owned by Adolphus Morris, a warm personal friend of my father. The two had been intimate for years, and the families of the friends maintained most cordial relations. Yet it was with sore and palpable quakings of heart that I betook myself to the office of the man who took on dignity as a prospective publisher, and laid bare my project. It was positive pain to tell him that I had been writing under divers signatures for the press since I was fourteen. The task grew harder as the judicial look, I have learned to know since as the publisher’s perfunctory guise, crept over the handsome face. When I owned, with blushes that scorched my hair, to the authorship of the “Robert Remer” series, and of the prize story in the Era, he said frankly and coolly that he “had never read either.” He “fancied that he had heard Mrs. Morris speak of the Remer papers. Religious—were they not?”