“I think it would be quite interesting,” she said, “if it should turn out that Mr. Dufour is a genuine foreign author, like Tolstoï or Daudet or——”
“Realists, and nobody but realists,” interposed Mrs. Philpot; “why don’t you say Zola, and have done with it?”
“Well, Zola, then, if it must be,” Miss Moyne responded; “for, barring my American breeding and my Southern conservatism, I am nearly in sympathy with—no, not that exactly, but we are so timid. I should like to feel a change in the literary air.”
“Oh, you talk just as Arthur Selby writes in his critical papers. He’s all the time trying to prove that fiction is truth and that truth is fiction. He lauds Zola’s and Dostoieffsky’s filthy novels to the skies; but in his own novels he’s as prudish and Puritanish as if he had been born on Plymouth Rock instead of on an Illinois prairie.”
“I wonder why he is not a guest here,” some one remarked. “I should have thought that our landlord would have had him at all hazards. Just now Selby is monopolizing the field of American fiction. In fact I think he claims the earth.”
“It is so easy to assume,” said Guilford Ferris, whose romances always commanded eulogy from the press, but invariably fell dead on the market; “but I am told that Selby makes almost nothing from the sales of his books.”
“But the magazines pay him handsomely,” said Miss Moyne.
“Yes, they do,” replied Ferris, pulling his long brown mustache reflectively, “and I can’t see why. He really is not popular; there is no enthusiasm for his fiction.”
“It’s a mere vogue, begotten by the critics,” said Hartley Crane. “Criticism is at a very low ebb in America. Our critics are all either ignorant or given over to putting on English and French airs.”
Ferris opened his eyes in a quiet way and glanced at Peck who, however, did not appear to notice the remark.