Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/99

 author I had been reading was pretty sure though all unconsciously to be flattered. I changed the story, and sent the MS. back to the waiting editor; and it was returned as the string snaps back to the bow, with a letter that showed plainly that his interest in the tale had all evaporated. He had no regrets, it appeared, save one perhaps, since he concluded his letter by saying:

"Besides, you have destroyed the fine dramatic ending which the story possessed in its first draft."

The experience uprooted another of society's oak-trees for me, and it has continued to lie there, with the roots of its infallibility withering whitely in the air, though humanity still somehow continues to arrange itself about the institution as best it can. This process of uprooting, I suppose, goes on in life to the very end; but it is wholesome after all, since life grows somehow easier after one has learned that human beings are all pretty human and pretty much alike in their humanness, and the great service of literature to mankind has been, and more and more will be, I hope, to teach human beings this salutary and consoling lesson.

But, in no way despairing, I kept the manuscript by me, and when I was not trying to write other stories I was retouching it, until in the end its fate was almost that of the portrait which the artist in one of Balzac's stories kept on trying to improve until it was but a meaningless scumble of gray, with no likeness to anything in this universe. Its fate was not quite that bad, however, since it made for me a friend.