“You—you didn’t think I wrote it, did you? Heron, you didn’t?” Sebastian’s dark mournful eyes implored satisfaction on this one point, at least.
“As a matter of fact, it’s not at all unlike your style.”
“What the Hell do you mean by that?” Sebastian sprang to his feet, knocking his shins against the brass coal-box. “My book——”
—“Is no book, any more than Letty’s maiden effort is a book. They’re both—what shall I call ’em?—Gory Exhibitions!” And having his victim completely down and at his mercy, Stuart proceeded forthwith to pummel him; showing thereby—despite Babs’ defence—a most lamentable lack of all gentlemanly instincts. But he had not forgiven his disciple for butchering his ideas; nor for sickening him with his own creed, as had been the case ever since Sebastian’s over-enthusiastic conversion.
—“You both write in blood, instead of in ink; upon my word, your style is like a pirate’s oath. No attempt at restraint or form. Form’s everything—colour nothing. One should write from the vantage-point of a god,—at least of a judge; aloof, impersonal, detached. But you take a bath every time, in what you’re pleased to call your inspiration: wallow, and splash, and breathe heavily, and yelp in your ecstasies, and wriggle in your agonies, all over the pages. I even suspect you of putting things down for the ‘sheer joy’ of unburdening yourself. And there we have the greatest evil. A book should be thought, crystallized into truth, hard as rock, stripped of all extraneous fungus, and with some clear purpose to serve in publication, whether of good or evil. But if you must have your attacks of luxurious hysteria,—for Heaven’s sake, man, keep ’em private. Suppress them. Suppress the ‘Sprawls of Sebastian’—‘Sebastian Spills Himself,’ as the stuff shouts to be called.”
“You needn’t worry any further,” Sebastian said, with very stiff lips, and a weary battered bewilderment as to what he had done, that ever since a certain night of August he should be exposed to these onslaughts; “because the book’s been refused.”
“Excellent!”
“And it was for you—not at all for the ‘sheer joy of unburdening,’—just for you....” But Sebastian kept these reflections to himself. And Stuart continued consolingly:
“But Letty’s story is no better than yours, for all that; it’s equally highly coloured and shapeless, but in a more marketable key.”