The World of Chance by William Dean Howells

Whether the boom for _A Modern Romeo_ which began with the appearance of / the _Metropolis_ review was an effect of that review or not, no one / acquainted with the caprices of the book trade would undertake to say. / There had been enthusiastic reviews of other books in the _Metropolis_ / which had resulted in no boom whatever, as Kane pointed out in / ironically inviting the author to believe that the success of the book / was due wholly to its merit.

"And what was its long failure due to? " Ray asked, tasting the bitter of / the suggestion, but feigning unconsciousness.

"To its demerit."

Mr. Brandreth was at first inclined to ascribe the boom to the review; / afterwards he held that it was owing to his own wise and bold use of the / review in advertising. There, he contended, was the true chance, which, / in moments of grateful piety, he claimed that he was inspired to seize. / What is certain is that other friendly reviews began to appear in other / influential journals, in New York and throughout the country. Ray began / to see the book on the news-stands now; he found it in the booksellers' / windows; once he heard people in an elevated car talking of it; somehow / it was in the air. But how it got in the air, no one could exactly say; / he, least of all. He could put his hand on certain causes, gross, / palpable, like the advertising activities of Mr. Brandreth; but these / had been in effectless operation long before. He could not define the / peculiar attraction that the novel seemed to have, even when frankly / invited to do so by a vivid young girl who wrote New York letters for a / Southern paper, and who came to interview him about it. The most that he / could say was that it had struck a popular mood. She was very grateful / for that idea, and she made much of it in her next letter; but she did / not succeed in analyzing this mood, except as a general readiness for / psychological fiction on the part of a reading public wearied and / disgusted with the realism of the photographic, commonplace school. She / was much more precise in her personal account of Ray; the young novelist / appeared there as a type of manly beauty, as to his face and head, but / of a regrettably low stature, which, however, you did not observe while / he remained seated.

It was specially confided to lady readers that his / slightly wavy dark hair was parted in the middle over a forehead as / smooth and pure as a girl's. The processed reproduction of Ray's / photograph did not perfectly bear out her encomium; but it was as much / like him as it was like her account of him. His picture began to appear / in many places, with romanced biographies, which made much of the / obscurity of his origin and the struggles of his early life. When it / came to be said that he sprang from the lower classes, it brought him a / letter of indignant protest from his mother, who reminded him that his / father was a physician, and his people had always been educated and / respectable on both sides. She thought that he ought to write to the / papers and stop the injurious paragraph; and he did not wholly convince / her that this was impossible. He could not have made her understand how / in the sudden invasion of publicity his personality had quite passed out / of his own keeping. The interviewers were upon him everywhere: at his / hotel, whose quaintness and foreign picturesqueness they made go far in / their studies of him; at the _Every Evening_ office, where their visits / subjected him to the mockery of his associates on the paper. His chief / was too simple and serious of purpose to take the comic view of Ray's / celebrity; when he realized it through the frequency of the interviews, / he took occasion to say: "I like your work and I want to keep you. As it / is only a question of time when you will ask an increase of salary, I / prefer to anticipate, and you'll find it put up in your next check to / the figure which I think the paper ought to stand. " He did not otherwise / recognize the fact of the book's success, or speak of it; as compared / with his paper, Ray's book was of no importance to him whatever.

The interviews were always flattering to Ray's vanity, in a certain way, / but it was rather wounding to find that most of the interviewers had not / read his book; though they had just got it, or they were going to get it / and read it. In some cases they came to him with poetic preoccupations / from previous interviews with Mr. Brandreth, and he could not disabuse / them of the notion that his literary career had been full of facts much / stranger than fiction.

"Mr. Brandreth says that if the truth could be told about that book," / one young lady journalist stated, keeping her blue eyes fixed winningly / upon the author's, "it would form one of the most dramatic chapters in / the whole history of literature. _Won't_ you tell _me_ the truth about / it, Mr. Ray?"

"Why, I don't know the truth about it myself," Ray said.

"Oh, how delightful! " cried the young lady. "I'm going to put _that_ in, / at any rate; " and she continued to work the young author with her / appealing eyes and her unusually intelligent flatteries, until she had / got a great deal more out of him concerning the periculations of his / novel in manuscript than he could have believed himself capable of / telling.

He went to Mr. Brandreth smarting with a sense of having made a fool of / himself, and, "See here, Brandreth," he said, "what is so very / remarkably dramatic in the history of a novel kicking about for six / months among the trade?"