The joylessness of the novel appealed to the bluenose. He read it and ordered his family to read it. They’d better learn as much as possible about the “worm that never dies.”
All crack-brains read it and approved.
Then the Great American Ass read it. All Iowa borrowed it from circulating libraries. Oklahoma read it. And finally Nebraska placed upon it the official chaplet of literary success.
Finally everybody read it—everybody from uplifter to shoplifter.
And it became a best-seller in rivalry with the exudations of the favourite female writer of the Centre of Population—a noisy and bad-tempered woman whose only merit was that she unwittingly furnished scientific minds with material for healthy laughter.
Thus the first novel of Barry Annan, purposely un-serialised as a ballon d’essai, ascended to the skies like the fat, bourgeois and severed soul of Louis XVI, amid a roll of revolutionary drums.
The unusual aspect of the case was that, technically, the book was nearly perfect; the style admirable and with scarce a flaw. Now the Great American Ass understands nothing of literary workmanship. Style means nothing to him. Yet he bolted Annan’s book and seemed to enjoy the flavour. Seemed to. For one never can know anything definite about an ass.
From the Pacific coast Betsy Blythe wrote Annan. She had read the novel. That, ostensibly, was her theme. She applauded his fame, expressed herself as proud to be numbered among the friends of such a celebrity.
Then there was some gossip about herself, the company,—inquiry as to how he had liked the pictures which she assumed he had seen in the East.