The World of Chance by William Dean Howells

After a silent and solitary dinner, Ray went to see Mrs. Denton and / Peace in their new lodging. It was the upper floor of a little house in / Greenwich Village, which was sublet to them by a machinist occupying the / lower floors; Ray vaguely recalled something in his face at his first / visit, and then recognized one of the attendants at Hughes's Sunday / ministrations. He was disposed to fellowship Ray in Hughes's doctrine, / and in the supposition of a community of interest in Hughes's daughters. / They could not have been in better or kindlier keeping than that of the / machinist's friendly wife, who must have fully shared his notion of / Ray's relation to them. She always received him like one of the family, / and with an increasing intimacy and cordiality.

That evening when she opened the street door to him she said, "Go right / along up; I guess you'll find them there all right," and Ray mounted / obediently. Half-way up he met Mrs. Denton coming down, with her cat in / her arms. "Oh, well! " she said. "You'll find Peace at home; I'll be back / in a moment."

He suspected that Mrs. Denton fostered the belief of the machinist and / his wife that there was a tacit if not an explicit understanding between / himself and Peace, and he thought that she would now very probably talk / the matter over with them. But he kept on up to the little apartment at / the top of the house, and tapped on the door standing wide open. The / girl was sitting at one of the windows, with her head and bust sharply / defined against the glassy clear evening light of the early summer. She / had her face turned toward the street, and remained as if she did not / hear him at first, so that there was a moment when it went through his / mind that he would go away. Then she looked round, and greeted him; and / he advanced into the room, and took the seat fronting her on the other / side of the window. There was a small, irregular square below, and above / the tops of its trees the swallows were weaving their swift flight and / twittering song; the street noises came up slightly muted through the / foliage; it was almost like a sylvan withdrawal from the city's worst; / and they talked of the country, and how lovely it must be looking now.

He said: "Yes, I wonder we can ever leave it. This is the first / spring-time that I have ever been where I couldn't feel my way with / Nature at every step she took. It's like a great loss out of my life. I / think sometimes I am a fool to have staid here; I can never get it back. / I could have gone home, and been the richer by the experience of another / spring. Why didn't I do it?"

"Perhaps you couldn't have done your work there," she suggested.

"Oh, my work! That is what people are always sacrificing the good of / life to -- their work! Is it worth so much? If I couldn't do my / newspaper-work there, I could do something else. I could write another / unsuccessful novel."

"Is your novel a failure? " she asked.

"Don't you know it is? It's been out three weeks, and nobody seems to / know it. That's my grief, now; it may one day be my consolation. I don't / complain. Mr. Brandreth still keeps his heroic faith in it, and even old / Kane was trying to rise on the wings of favorable prophecy when I saw / him just before dinner. But I haven't the least hope any more. I think I / could stand it better if I respected the book itself more. But to fail / in a bad cause -- that's bitter. " He stopped, knowing as well as if he had / put his prayer in words, that he had asked her to encourage him, and if / possible, flatter him.

"I've been reading it all through again, since it came out," she said.

"Oh, have you? " he palpitated.

"And I have lent it to the people in the house here, and they have read / it. They are very intelligent in a kind of way" --

"Yes?"

"And they have been talking to me about it; they have been discussing / the characters in it. They like it because they say they can understand / just how every one felt. They like the hero, and Mrs. Simpson cried over / the last scene. She thinks you have managed the heroine's character / beautifully. Mr. Simpson wondered whether you really believe in / hypnotism. They both said they felt as if they were living it."

Ray listened with a curious mixture of pleasure and of pain. He knew / very well that it was not possible for such people as the Simpsons to / judge his story with as fine artistic perception as that old society / woman who thought he meant to make his characters cheap and ridiculous, / and in the light of this knowledge their praise galled him. But then / came the question whether they could not judge better of its truth and / reality. If he had made a book which appealed to the feeling and / knowledge of the great, simply-conditioned, sound-hearted, / common-schooled American mass whom the Simpsons represented, he had made / his fortune. He put aside that other question, which from time to time / presses upon every artist, whether he would rather please the few who / despise the judgment of the many, or the many who have no taste, but / somehow have in their keeping the touchstone by which a work of art / proves itself a human interest, and not merely a polite pleasure. Ray / could not make this choice. He said dreamily: "If Mr. Brandreth could / only find out how to reach all the Simpsons with it! I believe a / twenty-five-cent paper edition would be the thing after all. I wish you / could tell me just what Mr. and Mrs. Simpson said of the book; and if / you can remember what they disliked as well as what they liked in it."