He indicated Mr. Weil as he spoke. Roseleaf's heart sank. For the first time he felt a deadly fear.
"Tell me, by all means," he responded, faintly.
Mr. Gouger's face bore its gentlest expression at that moment. He was taking valuable time, time that belonged to his employers, to say something that must temporarily disappoint, though in the end it might benefit his hearer.
"Let me repeat," he said, "that your work is well written, and that I have read it with the greatest interest. Its fault—an insuperable one—is that it lacks fidelity to nature. Mr. Roseleaf, I think I could gauge your past life with tolerable accuracy merely from what that manuscript reveals."
The novelist shook his head. There was not a line of autobiography in those pages, and he told his critic so.
"Oh, I understand," replied Mr. Gouger. "But this I have learned: Your life has been marvelously colorless. Yet, in spite of that, you have undertaken to write of things of which you know nothing, and about which, I may add, you have made very poor guesses."
Mr. Weil, leaning back in his chair, began to show a decided interest. Mr. Roseleaf, sitting upright, in an attitude of strained attention, inquired what Mr. Gouger meant.
"Well, for instance, this," responded the critic: "You attempt to depict the sensations of love, though you have never had a passion. Can you expect to know how it feels to hold a beautiful girl in your arms, when you never had one there? You put words of temptation into the mouth of your villain which no real scamp would think of using, for their only effect would be to alarm your heroine. You talk of a planned seduction as if it were part of an oratorio. And you make your hero so superlatively pure and sweet that no woman formed of flesh and blood could endure him for an hour."
The color mounted to Roseleaf's face. He felt that this criticism was not without foundation. But presently he rallied, and asked if it were necessary for a man to experience every sensation before he dared write about them.