“Why, you’ve just said it yourself!” her cousin suddenly reproached her.

“Said what?”

“That you weren’t so awfully shocked—­”

“I?  Oh, well—­you see, you’d keyed me up to such a pitch that it wasn’t quite as bad as I expected—­”

Mrs. Fetherel lifted a smile steeled for the worst.  “Why not say at once,” she suggested, “that it’s a distinctly pretty story?”

“They haven’t said that?”

“They’ve all said it.”

“My poor Paula!”

“Even the Bishop—­”

“The Bishop called it a pretty story?”

“He wrote me—­I’ve his letter somewhere.  The title rather scared him—­he wanted me to change it; but when he’d read the book he wrote that it was all right and that he’d sent several copies to his friends.”

“The old hypocrite!” cried Mrs. Clinch.  “That was nothing but professional jealousy.”

“Do you think so?” cried her cousin, brightening.

“Sure of it, my dear.  His own books don’t sell, and he knew the quickest way to kill yours was to distribute it through the diocese with his blessing.”

“Then you don’t really think it’s a pretty story?”

“Dear me, no!  Not nearly as bad as that—­”

“You’re so good, Bella—­but the reviewers?”

“Oh, the reviewers,” Mrs. Clinch jeered.  She gazed meditatively at the cold remains of her tea-cake.  “Let me see,” she said, suddenly; “do you happen to remember if the first review came out in an important paper?”

“Yes—­the ‘Radiator.’”

“That’s it!  I thought so.  Then the others simply followed suit:  they often do if a big paper sets the pace.  Saves a lot of trouble.  Now if you could only have got the ‘Radiator’ to denounce you—­”

“That’s what the Bishop said!” cried Mrs. Fetherel.

“He did?”

“He said his only chance of selling ‘Through a Glass Brightly’ was to have it denounced on the ground of immorality.”

“H’m,” said Mrs. Clinch.  “I thought he knew a trick or two.”  She turned an illuminated eye on her cousin.  “You ought to get him to denounce ’Fast and Loose’!” she cried.

Mrs. Fetherel looked at her suspiciously.  “I suppose every book must stand or fall on its own merits,” she said in an unconvinced tone.

“Bosh!  That view is as extinct as the post-chaise and the packet-ship—­it belongs to the time when people read books.  Nobody does that now; the reviewer was the first to set the example, and the public were only too thankful to follow it.  At first they read the reviews; now they read only the publishers’ extracts from them.  Even these are rapidly being replaced by paragraphs borrowed from the vocabulary of commerce.  I often have to look twice before I am sure if I am reading a department-store advertisement or the announcement of a new batch of literature.  The publishers will soon be having their ‘fall and spring openings’ and their ’special importations for Horse-Show Week.’  But the Bishop is right, of course—­nothing helps a book like a rousing attack on its morals; and as the publishers can’t exactly proclaim the impropriety of their own wares, the task has to be left to the press or the pulpit.”