have heard of it
already, I should think, from your mother.«
    »From mother? But it's the rarest thing for him to go there. Do you imagine
he is a constant visitor? I thought it better to say nothing until the thing is
actually done. Who knows what may happen?«
    She was in a strange, nervous state, and Reardon regarded her uneasily. He
talked very little in these days, and passed hours in dark reverie. His book was
finished, and he awaited the publisher's decision.
 

                                   Chapter 16

                                   Rejection

One of Reardon's minor worries at this time was the fear that by chance he might
come upon a review of »Margaret Home.« Since the publication of his first book
he had avoided as far as possible all knowledge of what the critics had to say
about him; his nervous temperament could not bear the agitation of reading these
remarks, which, however inept, define an author and his work to so many people
incapable of judging for themselves. No man or woman could tell him anything in
the way of praise or blame which he did not already know quite well;
commendation was pleasant, but it so often aimed amiss, and censure was for the
most part so unintelligent. In the case of this latest novel he dreaded the
sight of a review as he would have done a gash from a rusty knife. The judgments
could not but be damnatory, and their expression in journalistic phrase would
disturb his mind with evil rancour. No one would have insight enough to
appreciate the nature and cause of his book's demerits; every comment would be
wide of the mark; sneer, ridicule, trite objection, would but madden him with a
sense of injustice.
    His position was illogical - one result of the moral weakness which was
allied with his aesthetic sensibility. Putting aside the worthlessness of
current reviewing, the critic of an isolated book has of course nothing to do
with its author's state of mind and body any more than with the condition of his
purse. Reardon would have granted this, but he could not command his emotions.
He was in passionate revolt against the base necessities which compelled him to
put forth work in no way representing his healthy powers, his artistic
criterion. Not he had written this book, but his accursed poverty. To assail him
as the author was, in his feeling, to be guilty of brutal insult. When by
ill-hap a notice in one of the daily papers came under his eyes, it made his
blood boil with a fierceness of hatred only possible to him in