"You are right," he said. "You will learn that, among other lessons, before you are much older. There is no such thing as not picking and choosing. Whatever the grade of life, it is always done by those who have any sort of social impulse. I believe it is done in Eighth Avenue and Avenue A, when they give parties in little rooms of tenement houses and hire a fiddler to speed the dance. There is always some Michael or Fritz who has been ostracized. The O'Haras and the Schneiders follow the universal law. Wherever three are gathered together, the third is pretty sure to be of questionable welcome. This isn't an ideal planet, my dear lady, and 'liberty' and 'fraternity' are good enough watchwords, but 'equality' never yet was one;—if I didn't remember my Buckle, my Spencer, my Huxley, and my dear old Whig Macaulay, I should add that it never would be one."
Just at this point Kindelon and Pauline found themselves face to face with two gentlemen who were both in a seemingly excited frame of mind. Pauline remembered that they had both been presented to her not long ago. She recollected their names, too; her memory had been nerved to meet all retentive exigencies. The large, florid man, with the bush of sorrel beard, was Mr. Bedlowe, and the smaller, smooth-shaven man, with the consumptive stoop and the professorial blue spectacles, was Mr. Howe.
Mr. Howe and Mr. Bedlowe were two novelists of very opposite repute. Kindelon had already caught a few words from the latter, querulously spoken.
"Ah, so you think modern novel-writing a sham, my dear Howe?" he said, pausing with his companion, while either gentleman bowed recognition to Pauline. "Isn't that rank heresy from the author of a book that has just been storming the town?"
"My book didn't storm the town, Kindelon," retorted Mr. Howe, lifting a hand of scholarly slimness and pallor toward his opaque goggles. "I wish it had," he proceeded, somewhat wearily. "No; Bedlowe and I were having one of our old quarrels. I say that we novelists of the Anglo-Saxon tongue are altogether too limited. That is what I mean by declaring that modern novel-writing is a sham."
"He means a great deal more, I'm sorry to say," here cried Mr. Bedlowe, who had a habit of grasping his sorrel beard in one hand and thrusting its end toward his hirsute lips as though they were about to be allured by some edible mouthful.
"He means, Kindelon, that because we haven't the shocking immoral latitude of the French race, we can't properly express ourselves in fiction. And he goes still further—Howe is always going still further every fresh time that I meet him. He says that if the modern novelist dared to express himself on religious subjects, he would be an agnostic."
"Precisely!" cried Mr. Howe, with the pale hand wavering downward from the eerie glasses. "But he doesn't dare! If he did, his publisher wouldn't publish him!"
"My publisher publishes me!" frowned Mr. Bedlowe.
"Oh, you're a pietist," was the excited answer. "At least, you go in for that when you write your novels. It pays, and you do it. I don't say that you do it because it pays, but ..."