The publisher looked at him under heavy eyelids, recognised his position in the social scale, and reflected with satisfaction that his acquaintances could be relied on to purchase at least a hundred copies.  The interview did not at all take the lines that the author in his innocence had expected, and in a surprisingly short space of time he found himself bowed out, with the duplicate of a contract in the pocket of his overcoat.  In the outer office the confidential clerk took him in hand and led him to the door of an enormous cellar, lit by electricity and filled from one end to the other with bales and heaps of books.  “Books!” said the confidential clerk, with the smile of a gamekeeper displaying his hand-reared pheasants.  “There are a great many,” the author said timidly.

“Of course, we do not keep our stock here,” the clerk explained.  “These are just samples.”  It was sometimes necessary to remind inexperienced writers that the publication of their first book was only a trivial incident in the history of a great publishing house.  The author had a sad vision of his novel as a little brick in a monstrous pyramid built of books, and the clerk mentally decided that he was not the kind of man to turn up every day at the office to ask them how they were getting on.

The author was a little dazed when he emerged into the street and the sunshine.  His book, which an hour before had seemed the most important thing in the world, had, become almost insignificant in the light of that vast collection of printed matter, and in some subtle way he felt that he had dwindled with it.  The publisher had praised it without enthusiasm and had not specified any of its merits; he had not even commented on his fantastic use of the colon.  The author had lived with it now for many months—­it had become a part of his personality, and he felt that he had betrayed himself in delivering it into the hands of strangers who could not understand it.  He had the reticence of the well-bred Englishman, and though he told himself reassuringly that his novel in no way reflected his private life, he could not quite overcome the sentiment that it was a little vulgar to allow alien eyes to read the product of his most intimate thoughts.  He had really been shocked at the matter-of-fact way in which every one at the office had spoken of his book, and the sight of all the other books with which it would soon be inextricably confused had emphasised the painful impression.  This all seemed to rob the author’s calling of its presumed distinction, and he looked at the men and women who passed him on the pavement, and wondered whether they too had written books.