it to himself that
he found it uncommonly good.

One day, after a whole batch of ungrammatical novels had reached him
from the library, he posted his manuscript to his favourite
publisher. He had heard stories of masterpieces many times rejected,
so he did not tell his wife what he had done.

II. The Sleepy Publisher

The publisher to whom our author had confided his manuscript stood,
like all publishers, at the very head of his profession. His business
was conducted on sound conservative lines, which means that though he
had regretfully abandoned the three-volume novel for the novel
published at six shillings, he was not among the intrepid
revolutionaries who were beginning to produce new fiction at a still
lower price. Besides novels he published solid works of biography at
thirty-one and six, art books at a guinea, travel books at fifteen
shillings, flighty historical works at twelve-and-sixpence, and cheap
editions of Montaigne's Essays and "Robinson Crusoe" at a shilling.
Some idea of his business methods may be derived from the fact that
it pleased him to reflect that all the other publishers were
producing exactly the same books as he was. And though he would admit
that the trade had been ruined by competition and the outrageous
royalties demanded by successful authors, and, further, that he made
a loss on every separate department of his business, in some
mysterious fashion the business as a whole continued to pay him very
well. He left the active part of the management to a confidential
clerk, and contented himself with signing cheques and interviewing
authors.

With such a publisher the fate of our author's book was never in
doubt. If it was lacking in those qualities that might be expected to
commend it to the reading public, it was conspicuously rich in those
merits that determine the favourable judgment of publishers' readers.
It was above all things a gentlemanly book, without violence and
without eccentricities. It was carefully and grammatically written;
but it had not that exotic literary flavour which is so tiresome on a
long railway journey. It could be put into the hands of any
schoolgirl, and at most would merely send her to sleep. The only
thing that could be said against it was that the author's dread of
inspiration had made it grievously dull, but it was the publisher's
opinion that after a glut of sensational fiction the six-shilling
public had come to regard dullness