and that was to tell you just exactly how it happened and take the
consequences. But there is no reason why more than one person should be
brought into it, and so I will not let my friend sign this letter with
me, but I will put my own name alone to it. You may not think it is my
real name, but it is; you can find out by writing to the postmaster here.
I do not know whether you will publish it as a fraud for the warning of
others, but I shall not blame you if you do. I deserve anything.

"Yours truly,

"JERUSHA PEREGRINE BROWN."


If Verrian had been an older man life might have supplied him with the
means of judging the writer of this letter. But his experience as an
author had not been very great, and such as it was it had hardened and
sharpened him. There was nothing wild or whirling in his mood, but in
the deadly hurt which had been inflicted upon his vanity he coldly and
carefully studied what deadlier hurt he might inflict again. He was of
the crueller intent because he had not known how much of personal vanity
there was in the seriousness with which he took himself and his work. He
had supposed that he was respecting his ethics and aesthetics, his ideal
of conduct and of art, but now it was brought home to him that he was
swollen with the conceit of his own performance, and that, however well
others thought of it, his own thought of it far outran their will to
honor it. He wished to revenge himself for this consciousness as well as
the offence offered him; of the two the consciousness was the more
disagreeable.

His mother, dressed for the street, came in where he sat quiet at his