or whose criticism was feared.  Such is the universal need of human sympathy.  It is, at any rate, true that Philip’s story, recast and reinspired, was thenceforth written under the spell of the pure divining eyes of Evelyn Mavick.  Unconsciously this was so.  For at this time Philip had not come to know that the reason why so many degraded and degrading stories and sketches are written is because the writers’ standard is the approval of one or two or a group of persons of vitiated tastes and low ideals.

The Mavicks did not return to town till late in the autumn.  By this time Philip’s novel had been submitted to a publisher, or, rather, to state the exact truth, it had begun to go the rounds of the publishers.  Mr. Brad, to whose nineteenth-century and newspaper eye Philip had shrunk from confiding his modest creation, but who was consulted in the business, consoled him with the suggestion that this was a sure way of getting his production read.  There was already in the city a considerable body of professional “readers,” mostly young men and women, to whom manuscripts were submitted by the publishers, so that the author could be sure, if he kept at it long enough, to get a pretty fair circulation for his story.  They were selected because they were good judges of literature and because they had a keen appreciation of what the public wanted at the moment.  Many of them are overworked, naturally so, in the mass of manuscripts turned over to their inspection day after day, and are compelled often to adopt the method of tea-tasters, who sip but do not swallow, for to drink a cup or two of the decoction would spoil their taste and impair their judgment, especially on new brands.  Philip liked to imagine, as the weeks passed away—­the story is old and need not be retold here—­that at any given hour somebody was reading him.  He did not, however, dwell with much delight upon this process, for the idea that some unknown Rhadamanthus was sitting in judgment upon him much more wounded his ‘amour propre’, and seemed much more like an invading of his inner, secret life and feeling, than would be an instant appeal to the general public.  Why, he thought, it is just as if I had shown it to Brad himself—­apiece of confidence that he could not bring himself to.  He did not know that Brad himself was a reader for a well-known house—­which had employed him on the strength of his newspaper notoriety—­and that very likely he had already praised the quality of the work and damned it as lacking “snap.”

It was, however, weary waiting, and would have been intolerable if his duties in the law office had not excluded other thoughts from his mind a good part of the time.  There were days when he almost resolved to confine himself to the solid and remunerative business of law, and give up the vague aspirations of authorship.  But those vague aspirations were in the end more enticing than the courts.  Common-sense is not an antidote to the virus of the literary infection when once a