Page:Emily Climbs.pdf/264

Elder were looking over some books and Mrs. Rodney said,

“That story in the Times—A Bleeding Heart—was the strangest one I ever read. It wandered on, chapter after chapter, for weeks, and never seemed to get anywhere, and then it just finished up in eight chapters lickety-split. I can’t understand it.’

“I could have solved the mystery for her but I didn’t.”

WHEN The Woman Who Spanked the King was accepted and published by a New York magazine of some standing, quite a sensation was produced in Blair Water and Shrewsbury, especially when the incredible news was whispered from lip to lip that Emily had actually been paid forty dollars for it. For the first time her clan began to take her writing mania with some degree of seriousness and Aunt Ruth gave up, finally and for ever, all slurs over wasted time. The acceptance came at the psychological moment when the sands of Emily’s faith were running rather low. All the fall and winter her stuff had been coming back to her, except from two magazines whose editors evidently thought that literature was its own reward and quite independent of degrading monetary considerations. At first she had always felt dreadfully when a poem or story over which she had agonised came back with one of those icy little rejection slips or a few words of faint praise—the “but” rejections, Emily called these, and hated them worse than the printed ones. Tears of disappointment would come. But after a time she got hardened to it and didn’t mind—so much. She only gave the editorial slip the Murray look and said “I will succeed.” And never at any time had she any real doubt that she would. Down, deep