The naming of the book had been almost as difficult as the creation.  His first choice had been “The Lily of the Valley,” but Balzac had pre-empted that.  And then he had thought of “The Enclosed Garden” (Hortus Clausus), the title of a lovely picture he had seen.  That was Biblical, but in the present ignorance of the old scriptures it would be thought either agricultural or sentimental.  It is not uncommon that a book owes its notoriety and sale to its title, and it is not easy to find a title that will attract attention without being too sensational.  The title chosen was paradoxical, for while a nun might be a puritan, it was unthinkable that a Puritan should be a nun.

Mr. Brad said he liked it, because it looked well and did not mean anything; he liked all such titles, the “Pious Pirate,” the “Lucid Lunatic,” the “Sympathetic Siren,” the “Guileless Girl,” and so on.

The announcement of publication had the effect of putting Philip in high spirits for the Mavick reception-spirits tempered, however, by the embarrassment natural to a modest man that he would be painfully conspicuous.  This first placarding of one’s name is a peculiar and mixed sensation.  The letters seem shamefully naked, and the owner seems exposed and to have parted with a considerable portion of his innate privacy.  His first fancy is that everybody will see it.  But this fancy only comes once.  With experience he comes to doubt if anybody except himself will see it.

To those most concerned the Mavick reception was the event of a lifetime.  To the town—­that is, to a thousand or two persons occupying in their own eyes an exclusive position it was one of the events of the season, and, indeed, it was the sensation for a couple of days.  The historian of social life formerly had put upon him the task of painfully describing all that went to make such an occasion brilliant—­the house itself, the decorations, the notable company, men distinguished in the State or the Street, women as remarkable for their beauty as for their courage in its exhibition, the whole world of fashion and of splendid extravagance upon which the modiste and the tailor could look with as much pride as the gardener does upon a show of flowers which his genius has brought to perfection.

The historian has no longer this responsibility.  It is transferred to a kind of trust.  A race of skillful artists has arisen, who, in combination with the caterers, the decorators, and the milliners, produce a composite piece of literature in which all details are woven into a splendid whole—­a composition rhetorical, humorous, lyrical, a noble apotheosis of wealth and beauty which carefully satisfies individual vanity and raises in the mind a noble picture of modern civilization.  The pen and the pencil contribute to this splendid result in the daily chronicle of our life.  Those who are not present are really witnesses of the scene, and this pictorial and literary triumph is justified in the fact that no other effort of the genius of reproduction is so eagerly studied by the general public.  Not only in the city, but in the remote villages, these accounts are perused with interest, and it must be taken as an evidence of the new conception of the duties of the favored of fortune to the public pleasure that the participants in these fetes overcome, though reluctantly, their objection to notoriety.