ogene Flaherty? She's
anxious to start in as author's agent." The author had no objections
to raise beyond the fact that he disliked doing business with women
and was afraid of anybody named Imogene. The dime-novelist shook his
head and said women in business and journalism had come to stay. And
seriously, Miss Flaherty might easily be of immense assistance to the
author. "Very nice girl, too--h-m--hm!" This reminiscently. "Very
decent little woman. Go and see her--take my card--down in Cheyne
Walk. She had a flat down there near Church Street. H-m. Yes."

So it happened. And the result had been an explosion. Miss Flaherty
had accepted the commission and had read the manuscript and had, in
common parlance, gone up in the air. Her enthusiasm literally knew no
bounds. She did not actually foam at the mouth, but she displayed all
the symptoms of advanced literary hysteria. Now there is this to be
said for the sea--it may not furnish one with universal judgments
about women but it does provide the solitude and austere discipline
which enable a man to coordinate his hitherto chaotic ideas about
them. And women, if they only knew how they appear to the imagination
of men on the rolling waters, would undoubtedly modify their own
conceptions of life, and possibly profit by the change. Imogene,
however, had no such moment of illumination. She lived in an enchanted
world of imitation emotion and something in the author's manuscript
had set her off, had appealed to her rudimentary notions of fine
writing, and engendered a flame of enthusiasm. It is not too much to
say that she believed in that manuscript much more than the author
did. That is the correct attitude for a successful agent. Imogene did
not "push" the book, as salesmen say, so much as herald it. She
entered publishers' offices like a prophetess or one of the seraphim,
panoplied in shining plumage, blinding the poor human eyes with beams
of heavenly radiance, the marvellous manuscript, like a roll of lost
gospels, held out before her. She blew a blast on her trumpet and the
doors of the publishers' readers swung wide. No knowledge of English
literature prevented her from uttering her solemn conviction that here
was the greatest book since Geoffrey Chaucer laid down his pen. With
intrepid resource she warned the hesitating publisher that he
would have none save himself to blame if he missed this chance of
immortalizing his house, and eventually a publisher was discovered