THE THIRTIETH PAGE

Then came the day to shake off the icicles, leave the manuscript overnight at the reproduction center, and prepare a cover note for the next day’s delivery when I would place my child in the hands of an editor in exchange for a day’s reading of a fellow hopeful’s work.

I read my homework like the proverbial bat out of Hell and so, alas, did the editor. No, not his kind of thing at all.

And who was surprised? I had told him it was not his kind of book many months before in the days of composition, but he insisted on being the first to see it. His scant familiarity with my revival of an old and honored genre was limited by his unspeakable youth. American readers would not have seen anything like my work since the days of Harold Bell Wright, Ralph Connor, and John Fox, Jr. and those worthies who towered on bestseller lists back when the American twentieth century was a pup. He couldn’t smell a hot revival of traditional American values from nearly a century away.

We fulfilled our contracts with one another, and as swiftly as he returned my manuscript to me I returned his to him, rendering a bill significantly larger than usual. He continued to pay the higher rate from that day on. Guilt makes the best employer.