"I once wrote a story," Mrs. Singleton here spoke up, much to our astonishment—"and you need not laugh. There were some beautiful things in it, too, I know; but on reading them over I became at last possessed of a horrible fear that I had seen them elsewhere, though I couldn't be certain, and so in the end burned the manuscript."
"That is not strange," Mr. Seymour remarked, "for if we happen to say something that is beautiful, we are as conscious of it as others; but reflecting on the subject, it in time becomes common, and so assumes the air of being old. Immediately this is so, we suspect it is not ours, but something we have treasured in our memory, and so at last cannot distinguish between the two."
"I am surprised at what you say, Mrs. Singleton," Uncle Job interposed; "for I have heard the disposition to write was so intense that it could not be appeased."
"It was not so in my case, for I have never had any disposition to make a second attempt," she answered, amiably.
"If a man must write a novel, let him go ahead, and the Lord have mercy on his soul," Mr. Seymour went on. "The taste, however, that leads some to select the worst types of men and women to exploit, as if such people made up the rank and file of society, or any considerable portion of it, is beyond me. What earthly interest, for instance, have refined or decent people in the doings of the social drabs that some of our authors are at such infinite pains to portray?"
"There are such people, you will admit?" Uncle Job answered, as if to draw him on.
"Yes; and there are cataclysms in the sea and quicksands on the land, but neither the currents of the sea nor the highways by land lead to them. It is only the casual wayfarer who suffers through their existence, and so the impress of the disgusting creatures these novelists depict would be slight if not thus widely advertised."
"Then you think it does harm?" Uncle Job answered.
"Of course it does harm. I may say a foolish word and it counts for nothing. I myself will not remember it; but if some busybody or malicious person repeats it, then it circulates and has enduring life, as if stamped in bronze. So it is with the acts of those who disregard the moral ethics of society; but these authors give the reader the impression that the sun only shines by fits and starts, whereas the shadows are as nothing compared with its eternal radiance."
"They exaggerate the situation, you think?" Uncle Job insinuated.