Chapter LXV: Section 14: So a month passed by; and Thyrsis wrote again to the editor,

and was told that they were still discussing the story. And then, after two more weeks, there came another letter; and this was the way it read:

“I am sorry to have to tell you that the decision has been adverse to using your story. My own opinion of it has not changed in the least; but I have been unable to induce my associates to view it in the same light. They seem to be unanimous in the opinion that your work is too radical for us to put to the front. We have a very conservative, fastidious, and sophisticated constituency; and this is one of the limitations by which we are bound. I am more than sorry that things have turned out so, and I trust I need hardly say that I shall be glad to read anything else that you may have to submit to us.”

And there it was! “A conservative, fastidious, and sophisticated constituency!” Thyrsis believed that he would never forget that phrase while he lived. Could one get up a thing like that anywhere in the world save in Boston?

It was a bitter and cruel disappointment--the more so because it had taken six weeks of his precious time. But there was nothing to be done about it save to send off the manuscript to another magazine. And when it had come back from there he sent it to another, and to yet another--paying each time a total of eighty cents to the express-company, a sum which was very hard for him to spare. To make an ending at once to the painful episode, he continued to send it from one place to another, until “The Hearer of Truth” had had the honor of being declined by a total of fifteen magazines and twenty-two publishing-houses. The pilgrimage occupied a period of nineteen months--after which, to Thyrsis’ great surprise, the thirty-eighth concern offered to publish it. And so the book was brought out, with something of a flourish, and met with its thirty-eighth rejection--at the hands of the public!