"There now, Dee, consider yourself beaten!" and Dee acknowledged her defeat by helping Dum to the heart of the celery.
We had a merry dinner and found our new friends as interesting as they seemed to find us. We discussed everything from Shakespeare to the movies. Professor Green was not a bit pedagogic, which was a great comfort. Persons who teach so often work out of hours—teach all the time. If preachers and teachers would join a union and make a compact for an eight-hour workday, what a comfort it would be to the community at large!
"Edwin, Miss Allison——"
"Please call me Page!"
"Well, then, Page—it certainly does come more trippingly on my tongue—Page is meaning to write, and she, too, is putting things down in a notebook."
"I advised that," said Mr. Tucker. "It seems to me that if from the beginning I had only started a notebook, I would have a valuable possession by now. As I get older my memory is not so good."
When Zebedee talked about getting older it always made people laugh. He sounded somehow as little boys do when they say what they are going to do when they put on long pants. I fancy he and Professor Green were about the same age, but he certainly looked younger. He must have been born looking younger than ever a baby looked before, and eternal youth was his.
"I know a man in New York, newspaper man, who began systematically keeping a scrap-book when he was a youth. He indexed it and compiled it with much care, and now that he is quite an old man he actually gets his living—and a very good living at that—out of that scrap-book," declared Zebedee. "He has information at hand for almost any subject, and the kind of intimate information one would not find in an encyclopedia. He will get up an article on any subject the editors demand, and that kind of handy man commands good pay."
"It is certainly a good habit to form if you want to do certain kinds of writing, but it takes a very strong will for a writer of fiction who runs a notebook not to be coerced by that notebook. I mean in this way: make the characters do certain things or say certain things just to lead up to some anecdote that the author happens to have heard and jotted down in his notebook. Anecdotes in books should happen just as naturally as they do in life: come in because there is some reason for them. The author who deliberately makes a setting for some good story that has no bearing on the subject-matter is a bore just as the chronic joke-teller is. If you can see the writer leading up to a joke, can see the notebook method too plainly, it is bad art. I'd rather have puns—they are at least spontaneous."
"Please lend me your pencil, Zebedee," I entreated.