ne to
some; to others it is not without its drawbacks. Ideas that seemed
vivid and bright enough when they were penned have a bald tame look in
the new form in which they come back. The writer finds himself
judging the work as a stranger's, and forming the worst opinions of
it. He sees hideous gaps and crudities beyond all power of correction,
and for the first time, perhaps, since he learned that his manuscript
was accepted, his self-doubts return to him.

But Mark's feelings were much more complicated than this; all the
gratified pride of an author was naturally denied to him, and it was
thoroughly distasteful to him to carry out his scheme of deception by
such sordid details as the necessary corrections of printers' errors.

But he was anxiously eager to find out what kind of a literary
bantling was this which he had fathered so fraudulently; he had
claimed it in blind reliance on the publisher's evident
enthusiasm--had he made a mistake after all? What if it proved
something which could do him no credit whatever--a trap into which his
ambition had led him! The thought that this might be so made him very
uneasy. Poor Holroyd, he thought, was a very good fellow--an excellent
fellow, but not exactly the man to write a book of extraordinary
merit--clever, perhaps, but clever in an unobtrusive way--and Mark's
tendency was to judge, as he expected to be judged himself, by
outsides.

With these misgivings crowded upon him, he sat down to read the
opening chapters; he was not likely to be much overcome by admiration
in any case, for his habitual attitude in studying even the greatest
works was critical, as he felt the presence of eccentricities or
shortcomings which he himself would have avoided.

But at least, as he read on, his greatest anxiety was set at rest--if
he could judge by the instalment before him, and the book was not in
any danger of coming absolutely to grief--it would do his reputation
no harm. It was not, to be sure, the sort of book he would have
written himself, as he affected the cynical mode of treatment and the
indiscriminate satire which a rather young writer feels instinctively
that the world expects from him. Still, it was not so bad. It was
slightly dreamy and mystical in parts, the work of a man who had lived
more amongst books than in the world, but some of the passages glowed
with the rich imagery of a true poet, and here and there were
indications of a quiet and cultivated humour which wou