all their apparent jollity, were at heart quite wretched.
Don't mistake me. Their debts didn't worry them. Their trouble went deeper than any debts can go. This was it—nobody would accept their account of "Trixie."
The reviewers either damned the book for a preposterous lump of false and sentimental twaddle or praised it for a notable masterpiece of pathetic and elevating sincerity. Not one of them discovered it to be a buffoonery, a ludicrosity, a burlesquerie of quite astonishing farcicality. The people who came by the score to interview Dunkle all treated him reverently. When he assured them that "Trixie" was nothing but a parody on the Sob-Stuff Novel, they supposed that he was joking and went away to write columns about the endearing modesty of this Great
