"I mean what I say."
"Please explain."
"Very well. Since you so earnestly desire my honest and candid opinion, you shall have it. You remind me that I praised your earlier work, and suggest my inconsistency in not approving of your latest. My praise was sincere. I thought, and I have never changed my opinion, that the originality of your first books amounted to genius. Your last, however great its other qualities, has not that merit. It is, I think, conspicuously destitute of imagination."
"Do you deny its vitality—its faithfulness to nature?"
"Certainly not. I object to it as a barefaced plagiarism from nature."
"Then at least you'll admit that my heroine lives?"
"She does, unfortunately. Wouldn't it have been better taste to wait till she was decently dead?"
"Oh—I see. You mean that."
"Yes; I mean that. If you had no respect for your own reputation, you might have thought of Miss Craven's."