"Do those reasons prevent my having a message to deliver?" roared Westguard.
"No, they exist in spite of it. You'd write anyway, whether or not you believed you had a message to deliver. You've written some fifteen novels, and fifteen times you have smothered your story with your message. This time, by accident, the story got its second breath, and romped home, with 'Message' a bad second, and that selling plater, 'Philosophy,' left at the post——"
"Go on!—you irreverent tout!" growled Westguard; "I want my novels read, of course. Any author does. But I wish to Heaven somebody would try to interpret the important lessons which I——"
"Oh, preciousness and splash! Tell your story as well as you can, and if it's well done there'll be latent lessons enough in it."
"Are you perhaps instructing me in my own profession?" asked the other, smiling.
"Heaven knows I'm not venturing——"
"Heaven knows you are! Also there is something In what you say—" He sat smoking, thoughtfully, eyes narrowing in the fire—"if I only could manage that!—to arrest the public's attention by the rather cheap medium of the story, and then, cleverly, shoot a few moral pills into 'em.... That's one way, of course——"
"Like the drums of the Salvation Army."
Westguard looked around at him, suspiciously, but Quarren seemed to be serious enough.
"I suppose it doesn't matter much how a fellow collects an audience, so that he does collect one."