Now
wasn't it?"
I felt like a cur! And I had felt so every time the thing had recurred
to my mind, I may as well confess. I flushed hotly and said:
"Look here, have you nothing better to do than prowl around prying into
other people's business? Did that girl tell you that?"
"Never mind whether she did or not. The main thing is, you did that
contemptible thing. And you felt ashamed of it afterward. Aha! you feel
ashamed of it now!"
This was a sort of devilish glee. With fiery earnestness I responded:
"I told that girl, in the kindest, gentlest way, that I could not consent
to deliver judgment upon any one's manuscript, because an individual's
verdict was worthless. It might underrate a work of high merit and lose
it to the world, or it might overrate a trashy production and so open the
way for its infliction upon the world: I said that the great public was
the only tribunal competent to sit in judgment upon a literary effort,
and therefore it must be best to lay it before that tribunal in the
outset, since in the end it must stand or fall by that mighty court's
decision anyway."
"Yes, you said all that. So you did, you juggling, small-souled
shuffler! And yet when the happy hopefulness faded out of that poor
girl's face, when you saw her furtively slip beneath her shawl the scroll
she had so patiently and honestly scribbled at--so ashamed of her darling
now, so proud of it before--when you saw the gladness go out of her eyes
and the tears come there, when she crept away so humbly who had come
so--"
"Oh, peace! peace! peace! Blister your merciless tongue, haven't all
these thoughts tortured me enough without your coming here to fetch them
back again!"
Remorse! remorse! It seemed to me that it would eat the very heart out
of me! And yet that small fiend only sat there leering at me with joy
and contempt, and placidly chuckling.
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