Nor did she ever come to believe less in the
foreseeing care of God. She ceased perhaps to attribute so much to the
ministry of the angels as when she took the fiercer blast that rescued
from the flames the greasy note and blew it uncharred up the roaring
chimney for the sudden waft of an angel's wing; but she came to meet
them oftener in daily life, clothed in human form, though still they
were rare indeed, and often, like the angel that revealed himself to
Manoah, disappeared upon recognition.
By-and-by it seemed certain that, if ever Hector had had anything of
what the world counts success, it had now come to a pause. For a long
time he wrote nothing that, had it been published, could have produced
any impression like that of his first book; it seemed as if the first
had forestalled the success of those that should follow. That had been
of a new sort, and the so-called Public, innocent little
personification, was not yet grown ready for anything more of a similar
kind, which, indeed, seemed to lack elements of attraction and interest;
and the readers to whom the same man will tell even new things are apt
to grow weary of his mode of saying, even though that mode have improved
in directness and force; the tide of his small repute had already begun
to take the other direction. Those who understood and prized his work,
still holding by him, and declaring that they found in him what they
found in no other writer, remained stanch in their friendship, and among
them the little old lady who had at once welcomed his first poem to her
heart and whose name and position were now well known to Hector.
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