“Good God!” said Stewart. “Hetty is the one oasis of truth in a desert of sloppy sentimentality. She’s true because I happen to know her.”
“That is nothing to your credit, Stewart.”
Stewart stared. “Are you pulling my leg, Sam, or is this really serious?”
“Why should you doubt my seriousness when I ask that fiction should be devoid of offence?”
“Don’t you mean devoid of truth?” He recovered his temper and his perspective. After all, he was very short of money. “All right, Sam,” he said. “Edit me. Censor me. I thought I knew things, but there are deeps below the lowest depths, and you have reached them. I surrender. What are the terms?”
Sam offered terms which were quite generous. He might want Stewart again.
The novel was purged of Hetty and published. The three-page prayer of the distressed heroine was used, in paraphrase, from quite a number of nonconformist pulpits, and the book was a huge success. It was the first of that series—Branstone’s Happy Novels for Healthy Homes—which carried the strength of the literary emetic to a point of concentrated sweetness undreamt of before, and discovered somewhere a public stomach which did not reject its nauseating jam, but revelled in it.