"Poverty parts good company, used to be said," Minola thought; "a little money seems much more likely to part good company in my case."
Yet that there are advantages in a command of money was soon made very clear to Minola. When she returned from a walk a day or two after she found a specimen copy of Herbert Blanchet's poems awaiting her, with a note from Victor Heron. The letter was somewhat awkward and rueful. Mr. Heron explained that, by her express instructions, he had allowed Blanchet to have it all his own way in the arrangement of the style of his appearance in paper and print; and that the cost had become something far greater than he had anticipated.
"You should never have been troubled about this," Victor went on to say, "but that you made me promise that you alone should pay for this thing; I wish I hadn't made any such promise, or consented that Blanchet should have his way in the business. To think of a grown man, who has seen the world, leaving a matter of money and business in the hands of a girl and a poet! Blanchet has been going it."
Minola in all her trouble found room for wonder, delight, and something like alarm in looking at the superb edition in which the poems of Mr. Blanchet were to go before a world scarcely prepared for so much artistic gorgeousness. All that vellum paper, rare typography, costly and fantastic binding, and lavish illustration could do for poetry, had been done without stint on behalf of Herbert Blanchet. The leaves were as thick as parchment and as soft as satin. Only a very few lines of verse appeared on each broad luxurious page. Every initial letter of a sentence was a fantastic design. The whole school of Blanchet's artistic friends had rushed into combination to enrich the pages, the margins, and the covers, with fanciful illustration. If they only had been great, or even successful and popular artists, the book might have been worth its weight in gold. Unfortunately Mr. Blanchet's artistic friends were not yet great or famous. The outer world—the world which, in the opinion of the school, was wholly composed of dullards and Philistines—knew as yet nothing about these artists, and neither blamed them nor praised them. The volume was as large in its superficial extent as an ordinary atlas, and some of the poems which occupied a whole page were not more than four lines in length. The whole thing seemed truly, in the words of a poet whom Mr. Blanchet especially despised, "all a wonder and a wild desire."
Thinking of herself as the patroness and in some sort the parent of such a volume, Minola felt some such mixture of pride and timidity as a modest girl might own who has suddenly been made a princess, and is not quite certain whether she will be able to support her position with becoming nerve and dignity.
There came a little letter too from the poet himself. It ran in this fashion:
"Dear Patroness and Queen: The poet has not dared to send in unfitting casket the offering which your approval has made precious. The poems which are addressed to you must at least offer themselves in form not unworthy to be touched by your hand.
"In all devotion yours,
"Herbert Blanchet."
Nor did the volume want a poetical dedication. The second leaf contained the following: