Whatever the kind-hearted young man may have said about me I was given yet another chance.  A very business-like chap “took a shot at me,” as he expressed it, one forenoon at his desk, I was considerably distressed, however, by the confusion and the multiplicity of interruptions to which his attention to me was subject.  When I thought of the sacred privacy devoted to my creation, the whole-hearted consecration of my dear parent’s life-blood to my being, I felt that such a reading was little short of criminally unjust.  And how could any one be expected to savour my power and my charm in the midst of such distractions?  The business-like chap sat somewhere near the middle of a vast floor ranged with desks.  In his immediate neighbourhood a score or more of typewriters were clicking and perhaps half as many telephones were going.  The chap’s own telephone rang, it seemed to me, every five or six pages, and, resting me the while on his knee, he expectantly awaited the outcome of his secretary’s answering conversation.  At frequent intervals he was consulted by colleagues as to this and that:  covers, jackets, electros, fall catalogues, what not?  Nevertheless, he got through me in rather brisk order.  At my conclusion I observed no tears in his eyes.  And, it was evident, he settled my hash, as the phrase is, at this house.

I certainly felt sick at heart in that express car back to the corn belt.  My poor parent, when I again met him, unwrapped me very tenderly, and sat for a long time turning me through very dully.  I stayed on his desk for several days, and then fared forth again on my quest, valued this trip at a hundred dollars.

After the initial formalities, I fell this time first into the hands of a driving sort of fellow who had the air of being perpetually up to his neck in work, and who handed me to his wife with the remark:  “Here’s another job for you tomorrow.  Make a careful, working synopsis of the story, and I’ll dip into the manuscript here and there when I come home to get a line on the style and general character of the thing.”  The next night, after rustling energetically through me, he wrote out his report, and, passing it to his wife, said:  “There are no outright mis-statements of fact as to the plot in that, are there?”

I next fell in the way of a fashionable character just leaving for a week-end, who read me in the smoking-car on his way up into the country.  He burned several holes in my pages with the falling ash of his cigarettes.  He read me in bits between scraps of conversation with his seat neighbour and recesses of enjoyment of the flying scenery.  And he found it rather awkward holding me balanced on his legs crooked up against the seat in front of him.  This, my precarious position, led to a grievous calamity.  I toppled and fell, and my reader, making a swooping clutch at me as I went, but the more scattered my pages over the polluted floor of the car.  An evil draught carried my third page underneath a seat, the third forward from my reader.  It was an anguishing thing, but I could not cry out, I could not tell him:  as my reader, cursing me heartily (for what I cannot admit was my fault) gathered me up, he neglected to crawl far enough under the seat before him to perceive my page three.