"I have my eye on it," laughed the image, "and I admit that a few whiches and whos for thats, and—even—er—pardon!—a few of your dashes, would make its teaching more grateful."
"God," adjured I, happily, "thank you! Now do please stop and think! No speech, no thought, goes on without dashes. When we write the speech which flows mellifluous, we do violence to nature. And in all art the tendency is toward nature."
"Recently," began the deity, in that high tone which always meant checkmate to me, "I have seen the statue of an alleged athlete, in which his bunions were reproduced!"
"I saw it, too," I laughed. Indeed, the god and I had stared at it together.
"Well," the effigy went on, "that was certainly nature!"
"There is a golden mean," I re-quoted. "An artistic attitude toward all manifestations of art. If one has this one will appreciate—er—whether to reproduce the bunions. They may, of course, be picturesque bunions. Why, god, if one should reproduce human speech, as it is spoken, there would be a dash after every third word! Mine are quite within bounds."
"It would look queer," said the god, "and you would be called eccentric instead of original. Please don't do it! In fact stop it! Placate both your readers and your critics."
"Oh, as to that," said I, airily, "the labor would all be lost. Anything which is unusual to the superficial experience of the average person is glibly dubbed eccentric. You know how it is. A reader likes to find the dear old situations in advance of him so that he knows what he is approaching. There is the same fear of the terra incognita in literature that there is in nature. A book or a play which is too novel a tax upon the faculties of a client is not to his liking."
"Who, pray, do you write books for?" asked the effigy, with the suspicion of a yawn.
"The people who read them," said I, cockily.