jumping upon it, she said, and grinding his heel into it, till she couldn't bear to look at it. He said she did not write half so well as half a dozen other young women. She did n't write half so well as she used to write herself. She hadn't any characters and she had n't any incidents. Then he went to work to show how her story was coming out, trying to anticipate everything she could make of it, so that her readers should have nothing to look forward to, and he should have credit for his sagacity in guessing, which was nothing so very wonderful, she seemed to think. Things she had merely hinted and left the reader to infer, he told right out in the bluntest and coarsest way. It had taken all the life out of her, she said. It was just as if at a dinner-party one of the guests should take a spoonful of soup and get up and say to the company, “Poor stuff, poor stuff; you won't get anything better; let's go somewhere else where things are fit to eat.”      

       What do you read such things for, my dear? said I.     

       The film glistened in her eyes at the strange sound of those two soft words; she had not heard such very often, I am afraid.     

       —I know I am a foolish creature to read them, she answered,—but I can't help it; somebody always sends me everything that will make me wretched to read, and so I sit down and read it, and ache all over for my pains, and lie awake all night.     

       —She smiled faintly as she said this, for she saw the sub-ridiculous side of it, but the film glittered still in her eyes. There are a good many real miseries in life that we cannot help smiling at, but they are the smiles that make wrinkles and not dimples. “Somebody always sends her everything that will make her wretched.” Who can those creatures be who cut out the offensive paragraph and send it anonymously to us, who mail the newspaper which has the article we had much better not have seen, who take care that we shall know everything which can, by any possibility, help to make us discontented with ourselves and a little less light-hearted than we were before we had been fools enough to open their incendiary packages? I don't like to say it to myself, but I cannot help suspecting, in this instance, the doubtful-looking personage who sits on my left, beyond the Scarabee. I have some reason to think that he has made advances to the Young Girl which were not favorably received, to state 

 Prev. P 63/251 next