“Opened this morning! I sent six copies up to you. I suppose you got them?”
“No!” I tried so hard to say it firmly that it sounded careless. I would have added, “I did not know it was out,” but dared not attempt a sentence.
Mr. Morris attended us to the door to point to placards a porter was tacking to boards put there for that express purpose:
JUST OUT!!
ALONE!
By Marion Harland
The doctor nodded satisfiedly and handed me into the carriage. In taking my seat, I thought, in a dull, sick way, of Bruce at the source of the Nile. I had had day-dreams of this day and hour a thousand times in the last ten years. Of how I should walk down-town some day, and see a placard at this very door bearing the title of a novel written and bound, and lettered in gilt, and PUBLISHED! bearing my pen-name! The vision was a reality; the dream was a triumphant fulfilment. And I was sitting, unchanged, and non-appreciative, by the dear old doctor, and his full, cordial tones were saying of the portly purple volume lying on the seat between us:
“Well, my dear child, I congratulate you, and I hope a second edition will be called for within six months!”
He did not ply me with questions. He may not have suspected that the shock had numbed my ideas and stiffened my tongue. If he had, he could not have borne himself more tactfully. He was a man who had seen the world and hobnobbed with really distinguished live authors. It would not have been possible for him to enter fully into what this day was to me. When I thought of Bruce and the Nile, it was because I did not comprehend that the very magnitude of the crisis was what deprived me of the power of appreciating what had happened.
No! I am not inclined to ridicule the unsophisticated girl whose emotions were too mighty for speech that May noon, and to minimize what excited them. Nothing that wealth or fame could ever offer me in years to come could stir the depths of heart and mind as they were upheaved in that supreme hour.
The parcel of books had been opened and the contents examined, by the time I got home. I stole past the open door of my mother’s chamber, where she and Aunt Rice, who was visiting us, and Mea were chatting vivaciously, and betook myself to my room.
When my sister looked me up at dinner-time I told her to excuse me from coming down. “The heat had made me giddy and headachy.”