“Oh, quite possible, I should think,” returned the editor, blandly, but with a trace of indifference in his tone; for we had stayed a good while.
“I should think you might perhaps find a publisher if you were willing to pay the expenses yourself,” he suggested, as we arose.
“Pay! why I expected to be paid at once,” gasped Octavia, losing her dignified deliberation in dismay.
The polite editor smiled in superior wisdom as he bowed us out.
There was much more of the same thing; I should not have the heart to write in detail the rebuffs which gradually caused a white line to appear around Octavia’s firmly-set lips—even if there were no risk of wearying my readers.
We found, at last, a minor publisher, who was willing to allow “Evelyn Marchmont” to be left with him on the chance that his readers would “get round to it” in the course of a month or two. He further encouraged us by the assurance that about one in five hundred of the manuscripts read in his establishment was worth publishing, and that, provided the book trade was brisk. It did not promise to be brisk at this time of the year.
Octavia came away and left her manuscript, with a long, lingering look behind, as one might confide one’s child to the tender mercies of a surgeon.
I dragged her into a restaurant, for it was now late in the afternoon, and made her have some tea.
“Of course I knew it would not be easy,” she said, looking at me across the little table, with tired eyes, that made my heart ache. “I have had enough disappointments with my short stories to teach me that. I’ve read enough about these things, too. But I didn’t dream that it could be so bad! Why, they look at you as if you were a disturber of the peace, to have written a book! And to suggest that I should pay for it! What are publishers for?”
“Well, you see, they have to pay and take the chances,” I said, with the dispassionate candor of a business woman. “I suppose sometimes a book may not sell at all, and they may lose money. He said one in five hundred were not acceptable. And they don’t know how fine a story ‘Evelyn Marchmont’ is.”