Shall you want it?
And when?"
We can imagine the feeling of a publisher waiting for copy of her
promised story on reading this note! Also the following of a few days
later:--
"I am beginning a series of articles called 'Learning to Write,'
designed to be helpful to a great many beginners.... I shall instance
Hawthorne as a model and speak of his 'Note Book' as something which
every young author aspiring to write should study.... My materials for
the 'Planchette' article are really very extraordinary,... but I don't
want to write it now when I am driving so hard upon my book.... It
costs some patience to you and certainly to me to have it take so
long, yet I have conscientiously done all I could, since I began. Now
the end of it is in plain sight, but there is a good deal to be done
to bring it out worthily, and I work upon it steadily and daily. I
never put so much work into anything before."
A week later she says again:--
"I thank you very much for your encouraging words, for I really need
them. I have worked so hard that I am almost tired. I hope that you
will still continue to read, and that you will not find it dull.... I
have received the books. What a wonderful fellow Hawthorne was!"
There is something truly touching to those who knew her in that phrase
"almost tired." Indeed, she was truly tired through and through, and
these later letters from which I have made the foregoing extracts are
all written by an amanuensis.
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