This mood lasted for some weeks, at the end of which time he received the proofs, which he read and re-read with real pleasure before setting himself to correcting them with meticulous care.  He performed this task with such conscientiousness, and made so many minor alterations—­he changed most of those flighty colons to more conventional semicolons—­that the confidential clerk swore terribly when he glanced at the proofs before handing them to a boy, with instructions to remove three-quarters of the offending emendations.  A week or two later there happened one of those strange little incidents that make modern literary history.  It was a bright, sunny afternoon; the publisher had been lunching with the star author of the firm, a novelist whose books were read wherever the British flag waved and there was a circulating library to distribute them, and now, in the warm twilight of the lowered blinds he was enjoying profound thoughts, delicately tinted by burgundy and old port.  The shrewdest men make mistakes, and certainly it was hardly wise of the confidential clerk to choose this peaceful moment to speak about our author’s book.  “I suppose we shall print a thousand?” he said.  “Five thousand!” ejaculated the publisher.  What was he thinking about?  Was he filling up an imaginary income-tax statement, or was he trying to estimate the number of butterflies that seemed to float in the amber shadows of the room?  The clerk did not know.  “I suppose you mean one thousand, sir?” he said gently.  The publisher was now wide awake.  He had lost all his butterflies, and he was not the man to allow himself to be sleepy in the afternoon.  “I said five thousand!” The clerk bit his lip and left the room.

The author never heard of this brief dialogue; probably if he had been present he would have missed its significance.  He would never have connected it with the flood of paragraphs that appeared in the Press announcing that the acumen of the publisher had discovered a new author of genius—­paragraphs wherein he was compared with Dickens, Thackeray, Flaubert, Richardson, Sir Walter Besant, Thomas Browne, and the author of “An Englishwoman’s Love-letters.”  As it was, it did not occur to him to wonder why the publisher should spend so much money on advertising a book of which he had seemed to have but a half-hearted appreciation.  After all it was his book, and the author felt that it was only natural that as the hour of publication drew near the world of letters should show signs of a dignified excitement.

III.  The Critic Errant

There are some emotions so intimate that the most intrepid writer hesitates to chronicle them lest it should be inferred that he himself is in the confessional.  We have endeavoured to show our author as a level-headed English-man with his nerves well under control and an honest contempt for emotionalism in the stronger sex; but his feelings in the face of the first little bundle of reviews sent him by the press-cutting agency