He liked me, and his pretty wife (who had far more brains and vivacity than he) had made a pet of me. He honored my father, and was under business obligations to him. I was conscious, while I labored away at my share in my first business interview, that he lent kindly heed to me for these reasons, and not that he had the smallest grain of faith in the merits of my work. I was a child in his sight, and he would humor my whim.
“I am willing to submit your manuscript to my reader,” he said, at last.
I looked the blank ignorance I felt. He explained patronizingly. He had patronized me from the moment I said that I had written a book. I have become familiar with this phase of publisherhood, also, since that awful day.
“John R. T. reads all my manuscripts!” fell upon my ear like a trickle of boiling lead. “Send it down when it is ready, and I will put it into his hands. You know, I suppose, that everything intended for printing must be written on one side of the paper?”
I answered meekly that I had heard as much, bade him “Good morning!” and crept homeward, humbled to the dust.
“John R. T.!” (Nobody ever left out the “R.” in speaking of him, and nobody, so far as I ever heard, knew for what it stood.)
He was the bright son of a worthy citizen; had been graduated at the University of Virginia; studied at the law, and entered the editorial profession as manager-in-chief, etc., of the Southern Literary Messenger. He had social ambitions, and had succeeded in acquiring a sort of world-weary air, and a gentle languor of tone and bearing which might have been copied from D’Israeli’s Young Duke, a book in high favor in aristocratic circles. I never saw “Johnny”—as graceless youths who went to school with him grieved him to the heart by calling him on the street—without thinking of the novel. Like most caricatures, the likeness was unmistakable.
And into the hands of this “reader” I was to commit my “brain-child!” I cried out against the act in such terms as these, and stronger, in relating the substance of the interview to my father.
“Be sensible, little girl! Keep a cool head!” he counselled. “Business is business. And I suppose John R. understands his. I will take the manuscript to Morris myself to-morrow.”