Nothing less than this would really have satisfied Selah
Tarrant; his ideal of bliss was to be as regularly and indispensably a
component part of the newspaper as the title and date, or the list of
fires, or the column of Western jokes. The vision of that publicity
haunted his dreams, and he would gladly have sacrificed to it the
innermost sanctities of home. Human existence to him, indeed, was a huge
publicity, in which the only fault was that it was sometimes not
sufficiently effective. There had been a Spiritualist paper of old which
he used to pervade; but he could not persuade himself that through this
medium his personality had attracted general attention; and, moreover,
the sheet, as he said, was played out anyway. Success was not success so
long as his daughter's _physique_, the rumour of her engagement, were
not included in the "Jottings" with the certainty of being extensively
copied.
The account of her exploits in the West had not made their way to the
seaboard with the promptitude that he had looked for; the reason of this
being, he supposed, that the few addresses she had made had not been
lectures, announced in advance, to which tickets had been sold, but
incidents, of abrupt occurrence, of certain multitudinous meetings,
where there had been other performers better known to fame.
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