“I don’t care for them. I care for your opinion,” said Ray, perversely. “What did you mean by their being all different? Of course, I’m absurd! But you don’t know how much depends upon this book. It isn’t that it’s the only book I expect ever to write; but if it should be rejected! I’ve had to wait a long while already; and then to have to go peddling it around among the other publishers! Do you think that it’s hopelessly bad, or could I make it over? What did you dislike in it? Didn’t you approve of the hypnotism? That was the only thing I could think of to bring about the climax. And did it seem too melodramatic? _Romeo and Juliet_ is melodramatic! I hope you won’t think I’m usually so nervous about my work,” he went on, wondering that he should be giving himself away so freely, when he was really so reserved. “I’ve been a long time writing the story; and I’ve worked over it and worked over it, till I’ve quite lost the sense of it. I don’t believe I can make head or tail of those opinions. That’s the reason why I wanted you to tell me what you thought of it yourself.” “But I have no right to do that. It would be interfering with other people’s work. It wouldn’t be fair towards Mr. Brandreth,” she pleaded. “I see. I didn’t see that before. And you’re quite right, and I beg your pardon. Good-night!” He put his manuscript on the seat in the elevated train, and partly sat upon it, that he might not forget it when he left the car. But as he read the professional opinions of it he wished the thing could lose him, and never find him again. No other novel, he thought, could ever have had such a variety of certain faults, together with the vague merit which each of its critics seemed to feel in greater measure or less. Their work, he had to own, had been faithfully done; he had not even the poor consolation of accusing them of a neglect of duty. They had each read his story, and they spoke of it with intelligence in a way, if not every way. Each condemned it on a different ground, but as it stood they all joined in condemning it; and they did not so much contradict one another as dwell on different defects; so that together they covered the whole field with their censure. One of them reproached it for its crude realism, and the sort of helpless fidelity to provincial conditions which seemed to come from the author’s ignorance of anything different. Another blamed the youthful romanticism of its dealings with passion. A third pointed out the gross improbability of the plot in our modern circumstance. A fourth objected to the employment of hypnotism as a clumsy piece of machinery, and an attempt to reach the public interest through a prevailing fad. A fifth touched upon the obvious imitation of Hawthorne in the psychical analyses. A sixth accused the author of having adopted Thackeray’s manner without Thackeray’s material.