"It all depends on who makes the fiction out of them," I ventured.
"Not always," said Athalie. "There are facts which when straightly told are far stranger than fiction. I noticed a case of that sort in my crystal last winter." And to the youthful novelist she said: "Don't try to guess who the people were if I tell it, will you?"
"No," he promised.
"Please fix my cushions," she said to nobody in particular. And after the stampede was over she selected another cigarette, thoughtfully, but did not light it.[61]
VII
"You are queer folk, you writers of fiction," she mused aloud. "No monarch ordained of God takes himself more seriously; no actor lives more absolutely in a world made out of his imagination."
She lighted her cigarette: "You often speak of your most 'important' book,—as though any fiction ever written were important. Painters speak of their most important pictures; sculptors, composers, creative creatures of every species employ the adjective. And it is all very silly. Facts only can be characterised as important; figments of the creative imagination are as unimportant——" she blew a dainty ring of smoke toward the crystal globe—"as that! 'Tout ce qu'ont fait les hommes, les hommes peuvent le[62] détruire. Il n'y a de caractères inéffaçables que ceux qu' imprime la nature.' There has never been but one important author."
I said smilingly: "To quote the gentleman you think important enough to quote, Athalie, 'Tout est bien sortant des mains de l'Auteur des choses: tout dégénere entre les mains de l'homme.'"