Chapter 2 - Page 2

back from Mr. Pinhorn, accompanied
with a letter the gist of which was the desire to know what I meant
by trying to fob off on him such stuff. That was the meaning of
the question, if not exactly its form, and it made my mistake
immense to me. Such as this mistake was I could now only look it
in the face and accept it. I knew where I had failed, but it was
exactly where I couldn't have succeeded. I had been sent down to
be personal and then in point of fact hadn't been personal at all:
what I had dispatched to London was just a little finicking
feverish study of my author's talent. Anything less relevant to
Mr. Pinhorn's purpose couldn't well be imagined, and he was visibly
angry at my having (at his expense, with a second-class ticket)
approached the subject of our enterprise only to stand off so
helplessly. For myself, I knew but too well what had happened, and
how a miracle - as pretty as some old miracle of legend - had been
wrought on the spot to save me. There had been a big brush of
wings, the flash of an opaline robe, and then, with a great cool
stir of the air, the sense of an angel's having swooped down and
caught me to his bosom. He held me only till the danger was over,
and it all took place in a minute. With my manuscript back on my
hands I understood the phenomenon better, and the reflexions I made
on it are what I meant, at the beginning of this anecdote, by my
change of heart. Mr. Pinhorn's note was not only a rebuke
decidedly stern, but an invitation immediately to send him - it was
the case to say so - the genuine article, the revealing and
reverberating sketch to the promise of which, and of which alone, I
owed my squandered privilege. A week or two later I recast my
peccant paper and, giving it a particular application to Mr.
Paraday's new book, obtained for it the hospitality of another
journal, where, I must admit, Mr. Pinhorn was so far vindicated as
that it attracted not the least attention.