第40章 THE PANSOPHIAN SOCIETY(11)

"On my table,"the doctor answered."I have been consulting it."Lurida flung it open,in her eager way,and turned the pages rapidly until she came to the one she wanted.The doctor cast his eye on the beading of the page,and saw the large letters A N T.

"I thought so,"he said to himself."We shall know everything there is in the books about antipathies now,if we never did before.She has a special object in studying the nervous system,just as Isuspected.I think she does not care to mention it at this time;but if she finds out anything of interest she will tell me,if she does anybody.Perhaps she does not mean to tell anybody.It is a rather delicate business,--a young girl studying the natural history of a young man.Not quite so safe as botany or palaeontology!

Lurida,lately The Terror,now Miss Vincent,had her own plans,and chose to keep them to herself,for the present,at least.Her hands were full enough,it might seem,without undertaking the solution of the great Arrowhead Village enigma.But she was in the most perfect training,so far as her intelligence was concerned;and the summer rest had restored her bodily vigor,so that her brain was like an overcharged battery which will find conductors somewhere to carry off its crowded energy.

At this time Arrowhead Village was enjoying the most successful season it had ever known.The Pansophian Society flourished to an extraordinary degree under the fostering care of the new Secretary.

The rector was a good figure-head as President,but the Secretary was the life of the Society.Communications came in abundantly:some from the village and its neighborhood,some from the University and the Institute,some from distant and unknown sources.The new Secretary was very busy with the work of examining these papers.

After a forenoon so employed,the carpet of her room looked like a barn floor after a husking-match.A glance at the manuscripts strewed about,or lying in heaps,would have frightened any young writer away from the thought of authorship as a business.If the candidate for that fearful calling had seen the process of selection and elimination,he would have felt still more desperately.A paper of twenty pages would come in,with an underscored request to please read through,carefully.That request alone is commonly sufficient to condemn any paper,and prevent its having any chance of a hearing;but the Secretary was not hardened enough yet for that kind of martial law in dealing with manuscripts.The looker-on might have seen her take up the paper,cast one flashing glance at its title,read the first sentence and the last,dip at a venture into two or three pages,and decide as swiftly as the lightning calculator would add up a column of figures what was to be its destination.If rejected,it went into the heap on the left;if approved,it was laid apart,to be submitted to the Committee for their judgment.The foolish writers who insist on one's reading through their manuscript poems and stories ought to know how fatal the request is to their prospects.It provokes the reader,to begin with.The reading of manuscript is frightful work,at the best;the reading of worthless manuscript--and most of that which one is requested to read through is worthless--would add to the terrors of Tartarus,if any infernal deity were ingenious enough to suggest it as a punishment.

If a paper was rejected by the Secretary,it did not come before the Committee,but was returned to the author,if he sent for it,which he commonly did.Its natural course was to try for admission into some one of the popular magazines:into "The Sifter,"the most fastidious of them all;if that declined it,into "The Second Best;"and if that returned it,into "The Omnivorous."If it was refused admittance at the doors of all the magazines,it might at length find shelter in the corner of a newspaper,where a good deal of very readable verse is to be met with nowadays,some of which has been,no doubt,presented to the Pansophian Society,but was not considered up to its standard.