opinion."

Ten minutes after I was rolling away in a hansom towards Paternoster
Square, very anxious to persuade him that the way out of my
difficulty would be to end the chapter I was then writing on a full
close.

"That or a novel of a thousand pages," I said.

"A novel of a thousand pages!" he answered. "Impossible! We must
divide the book." It may have been to assuage the disappointment he
read on my face that he added, "You'll double your money."

My publisher had given way too easily, and my artistic conscience
forthwith began to trouble me, and has never ceased troubling me
since that fatal day. The book the publisher puts asunder the author
may not bring together, and I shall write to no purpose in one
preface that "Evelyn Innes" is not a prelude to "Sister Teresa" and
in another that "Sister Teresa" is not a sequel to "Evelyn Innes."
Nor will any statement of mine made here or elsewhere convince the
editors of newspapers and reviews to whom this book will be sent for
criticism that it is not a revised edition of a book written ten
years ago, but an entirely new book written within the last eighteen
months; the title will deceive them, and my new book will be thrown
aside or given to a critic with instructions that he may notice it
in ten or a dozen lines. Nor will the fact that "Evelyn Innes"
occupies a unique place in English literature cause them to order
that the book shall be reread and reconsidered--a unique place I
hasten to add which it may easily lose to-morrow, for the claim made
for it is not one of merit, but of kind.