"Oh! I see what you are driving at: Marr copied it out of a book."
"Undoubtedly, unless he lived before 'Coningsby' and 'Ixion' were written--somewhere about the beginning of the nineteenth century."
"Oh! Marr isn't so old as that," protested the boy, chuckling; "although he isn't a spring chicken, by any means. What Mabel sees in him, I can't for the life of me imagine."
"Humph! You were never renowned for imagination, Cannington," I said kindly, "and in your particular case it doesn't much matter. You're the man behind the gun, and all you have to do is to fire against the seen enemy."
"Huh! Why, half the firing is against the unseen enemy. If I haven't got your rotten imagination, Vance, I've got common-sense, and that's what you jolly well need."
"Rash youth, to speak thus to the man at the wheel. Don't you know that, with a little dexterity, I could shoot you into yonder ditch?"
"You'd travel with me," he sniggered.
"Why not? It would be an excellent advertisement for a popular playwright."
"Playwright be hanged! You only write beastly melodramas."
"Precisely; that is why I am popular. And if I'm not a playwright, what am I?"