"There is one encouraging fact, Duchess!" cried the novelist, of course an egoist, who called himself Douglas le Dare, though his patronymic was Barlow, and his father had christened him William. "It is that in our literature--the test of our minds--we keep to sane life and the plain truth. Fairy tales are not written nowadays; such originality is futility. We weave our romances round every-day life, we adorn dull truth, and what's the result? I sold fifty thousand copies of my last book."
"Did you really?" said Mrs. Thyme, opening her blue eyes to their widest. "I think I will write!"
"Ha!" he said, as he shook back his iron-grey locks--his hair was an advertisement--"you should write, but deal with facts--facts--the fairies--pah!--they are merely a sort of mental fungi. The public wants prose. Always please the public! That is the root of literary success."
June was alive now. Her wings quivered with indignation. The crown on her head blazed with elf-light. She was angry, angry. But she made no movement, only sat upright on the salt-box, keenly attentive to what those clay creatures would say.
"If you do start author, Katie," said the Duke to Mrs. Thyme, "you must cultivate an eccentricity or two, mustn't she, Mr. le Dare?"
"Oh, I don't know, Duke!"
"Oh, must I?" she exclaimed, eagerness alight in her eyes. "Do tell me an eccentricity or two!"
"Sorry I can't, Mrs. Thyme. All my spare time is occupied with thinking out my own eccentricities, what few I indulge in. No; what you really require is to be earnestly business-like, and to see well after the advertisement of your books."
Then a bearded Baronet, who wore a sparkling monocle, and thought it humorous to be interfering, joined in.
"Talkin' of fairies and the Lord Mayor," he said, "weren't you mixed up in that little business at the Mansion House, Mr. Archdeacon? Eh? What?"