human
That kind is the best, I said.
gpt
Did you write it during the late war?
human
Yes.
gpt
I suppose, then, it contains a careful record of each day's public events.
human
No, I'm sorry to say--
gpt
Nay, don't be sorry; that lack may save it from the waste-basket. Then my heart spoke.
human
Ah! madam, if you had only done what no woman seems to have seen the importance of doing--written the women's side of that awful war--
gpt
That's just what I have done, she interrupted.
human
I was a Union woman, in the Confederacy. I couldn't talk; I had to write. I was in the siege of Vicksburg from beginning to end.
gpt
Leave your manuscript with me, I said.
human
If, on examining it, I find I can recommend it to a publisher, I will do so. But remember what I have already told you--the passage of an unknown writer's work through an older author's hands is of no benefit to it whatever. It is a bad sign rather than a good one. Your chances of acceptance will be at least no less if you send this to the publishers yourself.
gpt
The Century as one of its
human
Wax-papers.
gpt
I have a true story that I want you to tell. You can dress it out--
human
Dress me no dresses. Story me no stories. There's not one of a hundred of them that does not lack something essential, for want of which they are good for naught. Keep them for after-dinner chat; but for the novelist they are good to smell, not to eat. And yet--tell me your story. I have a use for it--a cabinet of true things that have never had and shall not have a literary tool lifted up against them; virgin shells from the beach of the sea of human events. It may be I shall find a place for it there. So he told me the true story which I have called
gpt
Attalie Brouillard, because, having forgotten the woman's real name, it pleased his fancy to use that name in recounting the tale:
human
Attalie Brouillard.
gpt
I have a faint impression, he said,
human
Even so, what then? Good stories repeat themselves. I remembered having twice had experiences in my own life the accounts of which, when given, would have been great successes only that they were old anecdotes--great in their day, but long worn out in the club-rooms and abandoned to clergymen's reunions. The wise thing was not to find out or care whether Lever had somewhere told something like it, but whether the story was ever a real event in New Orleans, and, if so, to add it to my now, to me, priceless collection. Meeting the young judge again, I asked boldly for the story's full authentication. He said promptly that the man who told it of his own knowledge was the late Judge T. Wharton Collins; that the incidents occurred about 1855, and that Judge McCaleb could doubtless give the name of the notary public who had been an actor in the affair.
gpt
Let us go to his office right now,