FENNEL AND RUE

By William Dean Howells



I.

The success of Verrian did not come early, and it did not come easily.
He had been trying a long time to get his work into the best magazines,
and when he had won the favor of the editors, whose interest he had
perhaps had from the beginning, it might be said that they began to
accept his work from their consciences, because in its way it was so good
that they could not justly refuse it. The particular editor who took
Verrian's serial, after it had come back to the author from the editors
of the other leading periodicals, was in fact moved mainly by the belief
that the story would please the better sort of his readers. These, if
they were not so numerous as the worse, he felt had now and then the
right to have their pleasure studied.

It was a serious story, and it was somewhat bitter, as Verrian himself
was, after his struggle to reach the public with work which he knew
merited recognition. But the world which does not like people to take
themselves too seriously also likes them to take themselves seriously,
and the bitterness in Verrian's story proved agreeable to a number of
readers unexpectedly great. It intimated a romantic personality in the
author, and the world still likes to imagine romantic things of authors.
It likes especially to imagine them of novelists, now that there are no
longer poets; and when it began to like Verrian's serial, it began to
write him all sorts of letters, directly, in care of the editor, and