arriving here. It had lost all hope of any justice in the publishing
world, and was very cynical. Heavens! would I------

However, it appeared that at this house the first reader had just been
obliged to take a vacation owing to ill-health occasioned by too
assiduous application to her task of attempting to keep somewhere
abreast of the incoming flood of manuscripts. She was, it seems, a
large elderly lady who had tried out her own talents as a novelist
without marked success some twenty years ago. Her niece, a miss of
twenty or so, who had a fancy for an editorial career and who had
vainly been seeking a situation of this character for some time, found
a windfall in the instant need for a substitute first reader. It was
with some petulance, it struck me, that she yanked the door open one
day. She was, apparently, showing some one about her office. "All
that," she said, waving her hand toward my case, "practically
untouched; and mountains besides. I don't know how I'm to get away
with it. I suppose I'll have to do a couple every night." I don't
know what time it was, but the light was going and the young lady had
got into bed when she began to read me, propped up against her knees.
She yawned now and then and sighed repeatedly as she shifted back my
pages. I thought I noticed that her, knees swayed, just perceptibly,
at times. Then suddenly my support sank to one side; I started to
slide, and would have plunged to the floor, very nearly pulling her
after me, if the disturbance had not as suddenly caught the young lady
back into wild consciousness, and she grabbed me and her knees and the
slipping bedclothes all in a lump. Shortly after this she turned back
to see how I ended, and then went to sleep comfortably, lights out.

I did not see the report the young lady wrote of me, but I had occasion
to think that she declared I was rather stupid. However, I got another