Hector's new volume, larger somewhat, but made up of smaller poems, did
not attract the same amount of attention as the former, and the result
gave no encouragement to the publisher to make a third venture. One
reason possibly was that the subjects of most of the poems, even the
gayest of them, were serious, and another may have been that the common
tribe of reviewers, searching like other parasites, discovered in them
material for ridicule--which to them meant food, and as such they made
use of it. At the same time he was not left without friends: certain of
his readers, who saw what he meant and cared to understand it, continued
his readers; and his influence on such was slowly growing, while those
that admired, feeling the power of his work, held by him the more when
the scoffers at him grew insolent. Still, few copies were sold, and
Hector found it well that he had other work and was not altogether
dependent on his pen, which would have been simple starvation. And, from
the first, Annie was most careful in her expenditure.
Among the simple people whom husband brought her to know, she speedily
became a great favorite, and this circle widened more rapidly after she
joined it. For her simple truth, which even to Hector had occasionally
seemed some what overdriven, now revealed itself as the ground of her
growing popularity. She welcomed all, was faithful to all, and
sympathetic with all. Nor was it longer before her husband began to
study her in order to understand her--and that the more that he could
find in her neither plan nor system, nothing but straightforward,
foldless simplicity.
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