I approached the great person with beating heart. He had been kind to me in the past, singling me out, on account of some scholastic successes, for an annual vacation at the seaside. It has only just struck me, after all these years, that, if he had not done so, I should not have found the page of Society, and so not have perpetrated the deplorable compositions.
In the course of a bad quarter of an hour, he told me that the ballad was tolerable, though not to be endured; he admitted the metre was perfect, and there wasn’t a single false rhyme. But the prose novelette was disgusting. “It is such stuff,” said he, “as little boys scribble up on walls.”
I said I could not see anything objectionable in it.
“Come now, confess you are ashamed of it,” he urged. “You only wrote it to make money.”
“If you mean that I deliberately wrote low stuff to make money,” I replied calmly, “it is untrue. There is nothing I am ashamed of. What you object to is simply realism.” I pointed out Bret Harte had been as realistic, but they did not understand literature on that committee.
“Confess you are ashamed of yourself,” he reiterated, “and we will look over it.”
“I am not,” I persisted, though I foresaw only too clearly that my summer’s vacation was doomed if I told the truth. “What is the use of saying I am?”
The headmaster uplifted his hands in horror. “How, after all your kindness to him, he can contradict you——!” he cried.
“When I come to be your age,” I conceded to the member of the committee, “it is possible I may look back on it with shame. At present I feel none.”
In the end I was given the alternative of expulsion or of publishing nothing which had not passed the censorship of the committee. After considerable hesitation I chose the latter.