She hadn't forgotten him.
Julia, with her hair down, in an eau de Nile morning wrapper, and frying bacon over a Duplex oil stove, was not lovely, though, indeed, few of us are lovely in the early morning. She had started the flat before she was famous. It was a bachelor girl's flat where the bachelor girl was supposed to do her own cooking as far as breakfast and tea were concerned. Money coming in, Julia had refurnished the flat and requisitioned the part-time service of a maid.
Like the doctors of Harley Street who share houses, she shared the services of the maid with another flat dweller, the maid coming to Julia after three o'clock to tidy up and to bring in afternoon tea and admit callers. She was quite well enough off to have employed a whole maid, but she was careful—her publishers could have told you that.
Breakfast over and cleared away, Julia, with her hair still down, set to work at the table before a pile of papers and account books. Never could you have imagined her the Julia of the other evening discoursing on literature with Bobby.
She employed no literary agent, being that rare thing, a writer with an instinct for business. When you see vast publishing houses and opulent publishers rolling in their motor cars, you behold an optical illusion. What you see, or rather what you ought to see, is a host of writers without the instinct for business.
Julia, seated before her papers and turning them over in search of a letter, came just now upon the first letter she had ever received from a publisher—a very curt, businesslike communication, saying that the publisher thought he saw his way to the publishing of her manuscript entitled: “The World at the Gate,” and requesting an interview. With it was tied, as a sort of curiosity, the agreement which she had not signed.
It gave—or would have given—the publisher the copyright and half the American, serial, dramatic, and other rights. It offered ten per cent on the published price of all copies sold after the first five hundred copies; it stipulated that she should give him the next four novels on the same terms, as an inducement to advertise the book properly, and it had drawn from Julia the prompt reply: “Send the typescript of my novel back at once.”
So ended the first lesson.
Then, heartened by his evidently good opinion of her work, she had gone to another publisher. She had joined the Society of Authors, an act as necessary to the making of a successful author as baptism to the making of a Christian. She had studied the publishing tribe, its ways and its works; discovered that they had no more love for books than grocers have for potatoes, and that such a love, should it be exhibited, was unhealthy, for no seller of commodities ought to love the commodities he sells.
Arrived at the great, impudently advertising, roaring, trading firm that dealt with books as men deal with goods in bulk and, interviewing the manager as man to man, she had driven her bargain, and a good one, too. These people published poets and men of sciences—but they respected Julia.
Free of creative work this morning, she could give her full attention to accounts and so forth. She turned to a little book which she sometimes scribbled in, the contents of which she had a vague idea of some time publishing under a pseudonym. It was entitled “Never,” and it was not poetry. It was a thumb book for authors, made up of paragraphs, some long, some short.
“Never dine with a publisher—luncheon is even worse.”
“Never give free copies of books to friends or lend them. The given book is not valued, the lent book is always lost—besides, the booksellers and lending libraries are your real friends.”
“Never lower your price.”
“Never attempt to raise your public.”
“Never argue with a critic.”
“Never be elated with good reviews, or depressed by bad reviews, or enraged by base reviews—the public is your reviewer. It knows,” and so on.
She shut the book, having included:
“Never give a plot away.”
Then she did her hair and thought of Bobby. He had not fixed what hour he would call. That was a clause in the agreement which she had forgotten—she, who was so careful about agreements, too.
She dressed and sat down to read De Maupassant and smoke a cigarette. At luncheon time she went to the restaurant below stairs, and then returned to the flat.
Tea time came and no Bobby. She felt piqued, put on her hat and, as the mountain would not come to Mohammed, Mohammed determined to go to the mountain. Her memory held his address—care of Tozer, 12B, the Albany.
She walked to the Albany, arriving there a little after five o'clock. Tozer was in and he opened the door himself.