“Oh, I congratulate you,” he said.

“You see,” I began to combat the objections he had not had time to utter, “even for my work it will be a good thing—­I wasn’t seeing enough of life to be able to....”

“Oh, of course not,” he answered—­“it’ll be a good thing.  You must have been having a pretty bad time.”

It struck me as abominably unfair.  I hadn’t taken up with the Hour because I was tired of having a bad time, but for other reasons:  because I had felt my soul being crushed within me.

“You’re mistaken,” I said.  And I explained.  He answered, “Yes, yes,” but I fancied that he was adding to himself—­“They all say that.”  I grew more angry.  Lea’s opinion formed, to some extent, the background of my life.  For many years I had been writing quite as much to satisfy him as to satisfy myself, and his coldness chilled me.  He thought that my heart was not in my work, and I did not want Lea to think that of me.  I tried to explain as much to him—­but it was difficult, and he gave me no help.

I knew there had been others that he had fostered, only to see them, in the end, drift into the back-wash.  And now he thought I was going too....

“Here,” he said, suddenly breaking away from the subject, “look at that.”

He threw a heavy, ribbon-bound mass of matter into my lap, and recommenced writing his report upon its saleability as a book.  He was of opinion that it was too delicately good to attract his employer’s class of readers.  I began to read it to get rid of my thoughts.  The heavy black handwriting of the manuscript sticks in my mind’s eye.  It must have been good, but probably not so good as I then thought it—­I have entirely forgotten all about it; otherwise, I remember that we argued afterward:  I for its publication; he against.  I was thinking of the wretched author whose fate hung in the balance.  He became a pathetic possibility, hidden in the heart of the white paper that bore pen-markings of a kind too good to be marketable.  There was something appalling in Lea’s careless—­“Oh, it’s too good!” He was used to it, but as for me, in arguing that man’s case I suddenly became aware that I was pleading my own—­pleading the case of my better work.  Everything that Lea said of this work, of this man, applied to my work; and to myself.  “There’s no market for that sort of thing, no public; this book’s been all round the trade.  I’ve had it before.  The man will never come to the front.  He’ll take to inn-keeping, and that will finish him off.”  That’s what he said, and he seemed to be speaking of me.  Some one was knocking at the door of the room—­tentative knocks of rather flabby knuckles.  It was one of those sounds that one does not notice immediately.  The man might have been knocking for ten minutes.  It happened to be Lea’s employer, the publisher of my first book.  He opened the door at last, and came in rather peremptorily.  He had the air of having worked himself into a temper—­of being intellectually rather afraid of Lea, but of being, for this occasion, determined to assert himself.