she knew that they were to be expected:  indeed, they formed part of the picturesqueness of the situation in which she saw herself, alone in London, making her own fight for life as she found it worth living, by herself, for herself, in herself.  It had gone on for six weeks; she thought she knew all its bitterness, and she saw nowhere the faintest gleam of coming success; yet the idea of giving it up did not even occur to her.  At this moment she was reflecting that after all it was something that her articles had been returned—­the editors had evidently thought them worth that much trouble—­she would send them an off again in the morning, trying; the Athenian article with the Decade, and the rejected of the Decade with the Bystander:  they would see that she did not cringe before one failure or many.  Gathering up the loose pages of one article to put them back, her eyes ran mechanically again over its opening sentences.  Suddenly something magnetized them, a new interest flashed into them; with a little nervous movement she brought the page closer to the candle and looked at it carefully.  As she looked she blushed crimson, and dropping the paper, covered her face with her hands.

“Oh, Buddha!” she cried softly, struggling with her mortification, “no wonder they rejected it!  There’s a mistake in the very second line—­a mistake in spelling!” She felt her face grow hotter as she said it, and instinctively she lowered her voice.  Her vanity was pricked as with a sword; for a moment she suffered keenly.  Her fabric of hope underwent a horrible collapse; the blow was at its very foundation.  While the minute hand of her mother’s old-fashioned gold watch travelled to its next point, or for nearly as long as that, Elfrida was under the impression that a person who spelled “artificially” with one L could never succeed in literature.  She believed she had counted the possibilities of failure.  She had thought of style, she had thought of sense—­she had never thought of spelling!  She began with a penknife to make the word right, and almost fearfully let herself read the first few fines.  “There are no more!” she said to herself, with a sigh of relief.  Turning the page, she read on, and the irritation began to fade out of her face.  She turned the next page and the next, and her eyes grew interested, absorbed, enthusiastic.  There were some more, one or two, but she did not see them.  Her house of hope built itself again.  “A mere slip,” she said, reassured; and then, as her eye fell on a little fat dictionary that held down a pile of papers, “But I’ll go over them all in the morning, to make sore, with that.”

Then she turned with new pleasure to the finished work of the night, settled the sheets together, put them in an envelope, and addressed it: 

The Editor,
The Consul,
6 Tibby’s Lane,
Fleet Street, E. C.