Sir Dominick Ferrand

Sir Dominick Ferrand

There are several objections to it, but Ill take it if youll alter it, Mr. Lockets rather curt note had said; and there was no waste of words in the postscript in which he had added: If youll come in and see me, Ill show you what I mean. This communication had reached Jersey Villas by the first post, and Peter Baron had scarcely swallowed his leathery muffin before he got into motion to obey the editorial behest. He knew that such precipitation looked eager, and he had no desire to look eagerit was not in his interest; but how could he maintain a godlike calm, principled though he was in favour of it, the first time one of the great magazines had accepted, even with a cruel reservation, a specimen of his ardent young genius? It was not till, like a child with a sea-shell at his ear, he began to be aware of the great roar of the underground, that, in his third-class carriage, the cruelty of the reservation penetrated, with the taste of acrid smoke, to his inner sense. It was really degrading to be eager in the face of having to alter. Peter Baron tried to figure to himself at that moment that he was not flying to betray the extremity of his need, but hurrying to fight for some of those passages of superior boldness which were exactly what the conductor of the Promiscuous Review would be sure to be down upon. He made believeas if to the greasy fellow-passenger oppositethat he felt indignant; but he saw that to the small round eye of this still more downtrodden brother he represented selfish success. He would have liked to linger in the conception that he had been approached by the Promiscuous; but whatever might be thought in the office of that periodical of some of his flights of fancy, there was no want of vividness in his occasional suspicion that he passed there for a familiar bore. The only thing that was clearly flattering was the fact that the Promiscuous rarely published fiction. He should therefore be associated with a deviation from a solemn habit, and that would more than make up to him for a phrase in one of Mr. Lockets inexorable earlier notes, a phrase which still rankled, about his showing no symptom of the faculty really creative. You dont seem able to keep a character together, this pitiless monitor had somewhere else remarked. Peter Baron, as he sat in his corner while the train stopped, considered, in the befogged gaslight, the bookstall standard of literature and asked himself whose character had fallen to pieces now. Tormenting indeed had always seemed to him such a fate as to have the creative head without the creative hand. ......Buy Now (To Read More)

Product details

Ebook Number: 2716
Author: James, Henry
Release Date: Jul 1, 2001
Format: eBook
Language: English