y 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