f it that she could treat herself to an hour of pure glory.
She perfectly remembered that as often as I had heard her heave that
sigh I had been prompt with my declaration that a book sold might easily
be as glorious as a book unsold. Of course she knew this, but she knew
also that it was the age of trash triumphant and that she had never
heard me speak of anything that had "done well" exactly as she had
sometimes heard me speak of something that hadn't--with just two or
three words of respect which, when I used them, seemed to convey more
than they commonly stood for, seemed to hush up the discussion a little,
as if for the very beauty of the secret.

I may declare in regard to these allusions that, whatever I then thought
of myself as a holder of the scales I had never scrupled to laugh out
at the humour of Mrs. Highmore's pursuit of quality at any price. It had
never rescued her even for a day from the hard doom of popularity, and
though I never gave her my word for it there was no reason at all why
it should. The public _would_ have her, as her husband used roguishly
to remark; not indeed that, making her bargains, standing up to her
publishers and even, in his higher flights, to her reviewers, he ever
had a glimpse of her attempted conspiracy against her genius, or rather
as I may say against mine. It was not that when she tried to be what
she called subtle (for wasn't Limbert subtle, and wasn't I?) her fond
consumers, bless them, didn't suspect the trick nor show what they
thought of it: they straightway rose on the contrary to the morsel she
had hoped to hold too high, and, making but a big, cheerful bite of it,
wagged their great collective tail artlessly for more. It was not
given to her not to please, nor granted even to her best refinements to
affright. I have always respected the mystery of those humiliations, but
I was fully aware this morning that they were practically the reason
why she had come to me. Therefore when she said with the flush of a
bold joke in her kind, coarse face "What I feel is, you know, that _you_
could settle me if you only would." I knew quite well what she meant. She
meant that of old it had always appeared to be the fine blade, as some
one had hyperbolically called it, of my particular opinion that snapped
the silken thread by which Limbert's chance in the market was wont to
hang. She meant that my favour was compromising, that my praise indeed
was fatal. I had made myself a little