" On the 11th she says, "Reading
manuscript for the second time." The diary refers to reading the
manuscript on the third day, but on the two following days, in which
she was to finish as much of the romance as was ready, there are
wholly blank spaces. These mean more than words to me, who know so
well how she never set aside daily rules, and how unbrokenly her
little diaries flow on. She writes home:--
"Mr. Hawthorne has about finished his book. More than four hundred
pages of manuscripts are now in the hands of the publishers. I have
read as much as that, but do not yet know the denouement. He is very
well, and in very good spirits, despite all his hard toil of so many
months. As usual, he thinks the book good for nothing, and based upon
a very foolish idea which nobody will like or accept. But I am used to
such opinions, and understand why he feels oppressed with disgust of
what has so long occupied him. The true judgment of the work was his
first idea of it, when it seemed to him worth the doing. He has
regularly despised each one of his books immediately upon finishing
it. My enthusiasm is too much his own music, as it were. It needs the
reverberation of the impartial mind to reassure him that he has not
been guilty of a betise.
"Mr. Hawthorne had no idea of portraying me in Hilda. Whatever
resemblance one sees is accidental."
On November 8 (we were then in Leamington once more) she records in
very large script, "My husband to-day finished his book, 'The Romance
of Monte Beni.
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