Unceremoniously Guy Burnett interrupted her:
"Why should they? It's just this scurrying muddle, as you call it, that ought to be chronicled by any writer whose brain is sufficiently nimble to catch it. We can trust to historians for the eventual consistent balancing and summing-up; but just the slippery, shifting, sliding kaleidoscope of the war, as filtered through this personality and that——"
"Let me point out, Guy, that you can't filter a kaleidoscope ... at any rate, not in the presence of Leslie Campbell. We owe something still to the prestige of the firm."
"Nobody wants an impersonal and godlike summary of the Great War as yet. That would be impertinent, if you like!"
Patricia said lightly: "I beg of you not to apologize; I began a sentence about ten minutes ago; it's not of the faintest interest to anyone save myself—but allowing that, I'd like to finish it."
Burnett apologized profusely; and the company hushed their tongues, and gazed with admiring expectancy upon Pat O'Neill.
"Take it for granted that a professional writer feels like Mr. Graham Carr on the impertinence of nibbling at such a giant subject; take it also that the said writer is anxious to satisfy the public's yearnful plea for distraction from the one topic;—does Mr. Graham Carr realize the petty difficulties that beset such a writer from the outset? A novel that does not deal with the war, must presumably not be laid in times of war; because the war, if once mentioned, inevitably occupies the foreground—as it has in all our lives. Therefore the writer, even if he or she wishes to be up-to-date, must break the tale off sharply at the end of June, nineteen-fourteen. And if the characters are to spread themselves and grow old, he must either let them disport themselves in a wholly problematic after-the-war period—in which God help the prophetic instinct!—or else reckon all his dates and everybody's ages backwards from the last chapter, so as to be correct in a false assumption that modern times ended two years ago ... which mathematical callisthenics will probably land him in a bag of anachronisms——"
"Heavens, child! it's not at all necessary to do all that; there are surely millions of old books to satisfy that section of the reading public who require distraction from the war."
"Then if WE—the literary fraternity—are neither to express ourselves on the subject of the war, nor on the subject of otherwise, with what do you suggest our busy pens shall be occupied?"
"With nothing, for the duration of the war. Let 'em rust. Nobody will miss 'em; and there's plenty of emergency work to be done. I can safely make this statement, as none of us present are squandering our energies on irrelevant fiction."