The Girls of Slender Means Read Online Free PDF Page B

portion of his mind, that authors were sly enough to make themselves invisible and be always floating under the chairs of publishers' offices.
        "You see, Jane," said George, "these tactics of mine are an essential part of the profession. All the publishers do it. The big firms do it too, they do it automatically. The big fellows can afford to do it automatically, they can't afford to acknowledge all the facts like me, too much face to lose. I've had to work out every move for myself and get everything clear in my mind where authors are concerned. In publishing, one is dealing with a temperamental raw material."
        He went over to the corner curtain which concealed a coat-rail, and pulled aside the curtain. He peered within, then closed the curtain again and continued, "Always think of authors as your raw material, Jane, if you're going to stay in the world of books." Jane took this for fact. She had now been given Nicholas Farringdon to work on. George had said he was a terrible risk. Jane judged his age to be just over thirty. He was known only as a poet of small talent and an anarchist of dubious loyalty to that cause; but even these details were not at first known to Jane. He had brought to George a worn-out-looking sheaf of typewritten pages, untidily stacked in a brown folder. The whole was entitled _The Sabbath Notebooks__.
        Nicholas Farringdon differed in some noticeable respects from the other writers she had come across. He differed, unnoticeably so far, in that he knew he was being worked on. But meantime she observed he was more arrogant and more impatient than other authors of the intellectual class. She noticed he was more attractive.
        She had achieved some success with the very intellectual author of _The Symbolism of Louisa May Alcott__, which George was now selling very well and fast in certain quarters, since it had a big lesbian theme. She had achieved some success with Rudi Bittesch, the Rumanian who called on her frequently at the club.
        But Nicholas had produced a more upsetting effect than usual on George, who was moreover torn between his attraction to a book he could not understand and his fear of its failure. George handed him over to Jane for treatment and meanwhile complained nightly to Tilly that he was in the hands of a writer, lazy, irresponsible, insufferable and cunning.
        Inspired by a brain-wave, Jane's first approach to a writer had been, "What is your raison d'être?" It had worked marvellously. She tried it on Nicholas Farringdon when he called to the office about his manuscript one day when George was "at a meeting," which was to say, hiding in the back office. "What is your raison d'être, Mr. Farringdon?"
        He frowned at her in an abstract sort of way, as if she were a speaking machine that had gone wrong.
        Inspired by another brain-wave, Jane invited him to dine at the May of Teck Club. He accepted with a special modesty, plainly from concern for this book. It had been rejected by ten publishers already, as had most of the books that came to George.
        His visit put Jane up in the estimation of the club. She had not expected him to react so eagerly to everything. Sipping black Nescafe in the drawing room with Jane, Selina, dark little Judy Redwood and Anne, he had looked round with a faint, contented smile. Jane had chosen her companions for the evening with the instinct of an experimental procuress which, when she perceived the extent of its success, she partly regretted and partly congratulated herself on, since she had not been sure from various reports whether Nicholas preferred men, and now she concluded that he at least liked both sexes. Selina's long unsurpassable legs arranged themselves diagonally from the deep chair where she lolled in the distinct attitude of being the only woman present who could afford to loll. There was something about Selina's lolling which gave her a queenly eminence. She visibly appraised