For several weeks her book had been announced as in press, and her publishers printed most flattering circulars, which heightened expectation, and paved the way for its favorable reception.  Save the first chapter, rejected by Mr. Manning long before, no one had seen the Ms., and while the reading public was on the qui vive, the author was rapidly maturing the plot of a second work.

Finally, the book was bound; editors’ copies winged their way throughout the country; the curious eagerly supplied themselves with the latest publication; and Edna’s destiny as an author hung in the balance.

It was with strange emotions that she handled the copy sent to her, for it seemed indeed a part of herself.  She knew that her own heart was throbbing in its pages, and wondered whether the great world-pulses would beat in unison.

Instead of a preface she had quoted on the title-page those pithy lines in “Aurora Leigh”: 

“My critic Belfair wants a book Entirely different, which will sell and live; A striking book, yet not a startling book—­The public blames originalities.  You must not pump spring-water unawares Upon a gracious public full of nerves—­Good things, not subtle—­new, yet orthodox; As easy reading as the dog-eared page That’s fingered by said public fifty years, Since first taught spelling by its grandmother, And yet a revelation in some sort:  That’s hard, my critic Belfair!”

Now, as Edna nestled her fingers among the pages of her book, a tear fell and moistened them, and the unvoiced language of her soul was, “Grandpa! do you keep close enough to me to read my book?  Oh! do you like it? are you satisfied?  Are you proud of your poor little Pearl?”

The days were tediously long while she waited in suspense for the result of the weighing in editors’ sanctums, for the awful verdict of the critical Sanhedrim.  A week dragged itself away; and the severity of the decree might have entitled it to one of those slips of blue paper upon which Frederick the Great required his courts to inscribe their sentences of death.  Edna learned the full import of the words: 

“He that writes, Or makes a feast, more certainly invites His judges than his friends; there’s not a guest But will find something wanting or ill-drest.”

Newspapers pronounced the book a failure.  Some sneered in a gentlemanly manner, employing polite phraseology; others coarsely caricatured it.  Many were insulted by its incomprehensible erudition; a few growled at its shallowness.  To-day there was a hint at plagiarism; to-morrow an outright, wholesale theft was asserted.  Now she was a pedant; and then a sciolist.  Reviews poured in upon her thick and fast; all found grievous faults, but no two reviewers settled on the same error.  What one seemed disposed to consider almost laudable the other denounced violently.  One eminently shrewd, lynx-eyed editor discovered that two of her characters were stolen from a book