Exit Barnstaple.
A (looking over his memoranda.)—It will do! (Hopping and dancing about the room.) Hurrah! my tailor’s bill will be paid after all!
Part II.
Mr Arthur Ansard’s Chambers as before. Mr Ansard. with his eyes fixed upon the wig block, gnawing the feather end of his pen. The table, covered with sundry sheets of foolscap, show strong symptoms of the Novel progressing.
Ansard (solus).
Where is Barnstaple? If he do not come soon, I shall have finished my novel without a heroine. Well, I’m not the first person who has been foiled by a woman. (Continues to gnaw his pen in a brown study.)
Barnstaple enters unperceived, and slaps Ansard on the shoulder. The latter starts up.
B. So, friend Ansard, making your dinner off your pen: it is not every novel-writer who can contrive to do that even in anticipation. Have you profited by my instructions?
A. I wish I had. I assure you that this light diet has not contributed, as might be expected, to assist a heavy head, and one feather is not sufficient to enable my genius to take wing. If the public knew what dull work it is to write a novel, they would not be surprised at finding them dull reading. Ex nihilo nihil fit. Barnstaple, I am at the very bathos of stupidity.