"It's a very good review," she said. "I thought he didn't like the book much!"
"So did I. I hope he isn't just writing like this to please me. I don't want insincere reviews!..."
"I expect," said Eleanor, "he didn't tell you how much, he really liked it!"
He put the paper in his pocket, and as the train drew out of Easton and started on its journey to Cottenham, he speculated on the sincerity of Hinde's review. He took the paper out of his pocket and read it again. The review was headed, "A REMARKABLE FIRST NOVEL" and was full of phrases that seemed fulsome even to John. "We prophesy that this notable novel will have a very great success among the reading public. It is certainly the finest story of its kind that has been _published in this country for a generation_."
"I wouldn't have said that about it myself," John reflected. "Of course, I'd like to think it's true, but!... I hope this isn't just logrolling!" He remembered how fiercely Hinde had described the back-scratching, high-minded poets who boomed each other in their papers. "I don't want to get praise that way," he thought, putting the paper back into his pocket. "I'll order half-a-dozen copies of the _Herald_ when I get back from Cottenham. My Uncle William will be glad of a copy, and so will Mr. Cairnduff and the minister!..."
The Cottenham Repertory Theatre was a dingy, ill-built house in a back street in Cottenham. It had been a music-hall of a low class until the earnest playgoers of Cottenham, extremely anxious about the condition of the drama, formed themselves into a society to improve the theatre. By dint of agitation and much hard work, they contrived to get enough money together to take the music-hall over from its owner who was unable to compete against the syndicate halls and was steadily drinking himself to death in consequence, and turned it into a repertory theatre. Their success had been moderate, for they united to their good intentions a habit of denunciation of all plays that were not "repertory" plays which had the effect partly of irritating the common playgoer and partly of frightening him. All the plays that were labelled "repertory" plays were praised by these earnest students of the drama without any sort of discrimination, and when, as often happened, a very poor play was produced at the Repertory Theatre, any common playgoer who saw it and was bored by it, went away in the belief that he was not educated up to the standard of such austere work and resolved that he would seek his entertainment elsewhere in future. It was to this theatre that John went on the day after his arrival in Cottenham. The town itself depressed him immeasurably. It was the most shapeless, nondescript, undignified town he had ever seen, and yet it was one of the richest places in England. There was no seemliness in its main streets; little huckstering shops hustled larger and more pretentious shops, but all of them had an air of vivacious vulgarity. They had not been given the look of sobriety which age gives even to ugly streets in ugly towns. They seemed to be striving against each other in a competition to decide which was the commonest and shoddiest shop in the city. It seemed to John that all these Cottenham shops dropped their aitches!... The clouds were grey when he arrived in Cottenham, dirty-grey and very cheerless; they were still dirty-grey when he went to the theatre, and rain fell before he reached it; and the clouds remained in that dismal state until he quitted Cottenham after the first performance of _Milchu and St. Patrick: A Tragedy_. It seemed to John that they would never be otherwise than dirty-grey, that the streets would always be wet and the shops always clamantly vulgar.