“You know it’s really that,” one publisher explained to Ray. “_No_ one can tell whether a book will succeed or not; no one knows what makes a book succeed. We have published things that I’ve liked and respected thoroughly, and that I’ve taken a personal pride and pleasure in pushing. They’ve been well received and intelligently praised by the best critics from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and cultivated people have talked about them everywhere; and they haven’t sold fifteen hundred copies. Then we’ve tried trash--decent trash, of course; we always remember the cheek of the Young Person--and we’ve all believed that we had something that would hit the popular mood, and would leap into the tens of thousands; and it’s dropped dead from the press. Other works of art and other pieces of trash succeed for no better reason than some fail. You can’t tell anything about it. If I were to trust my own observation, I should say it was _luck_, pure and simple, and mostly bad luck. Ten books fail, and twenty books barely pay, where one succeeds. Nobody can say why. Can’t I send you some of our new books?” He had a number of them on a table near him, and he talked them over with Ray, while a clerk did them up; and he would not let Ray trouble himself to carry them away with him. They were everywhere lavish of their publications with him, and he had so many new books and advance sheets given him that if he had been going to write his letters for the _Echo_ about literature alone, he would have had material for many weeks ahead. The letters he got at this time were some from home: a very sweet one from his mother, fondly conjecturing and questioning about his comfort in New York, and cautioning him not to take cold; a serious one from his father, advising him to try each week to put by something for a rainy day. There was also a letter from Sanderson, gay with news of all the goings on in Midland, and hilariously regretful of his absence. Sanderson did not say anything about coming to New York to seek his fortune, and the effect of his news was to leave Ray pining for the society of women, which had always been the sweetest thing in life to him, and next to literature the dearest. If he could have had immediate literary success, the excitement of it might have made him forget the privilege he had enjoyed at Midland of going every evening to call on some lovely young girl, and of staying as long as he liked. What made him feel still more lonesome and dropped out was Sanderson’s telling of several engagements among the girls they knew in Midland; it appeared to him that he only was destined to go loveless and mateless through life.