"What have you done yourself?" she asked.
"I—well, I write regularly for the Patriarch," he said, with the complacency of one who thinks that he need say no more. "The editor himself came to stay with us last week, and that means something. Just now, however, I am contemplating a work of fiction, an important work, if I may venture to say so myself. It has been on my mind for years."
"Indeed," said Beth. "What is its purpose?"
"Purpose!" he ejaculated. "Had you said pur-port instead of pur-pose, it would have been a sensible question. It is hardly likely I shall write a novel with a purpose. I leave that to the ladies."
"I have read somewhere that Milton said the poet's mission was 'to allay the perturbation of the mind and set the affections in right tune,'—is not that a purpose?" Beth asked. "And one in our own day has talked of 'that great social duty to impart what we believe and what we think we have learned. Among the few things of which we can pronounce ourselves certain is the obligation of inquirers after truth to communicate what they obtain.'"
"But not in the form of fiction," Alfred Cayley Pounce put in dogmatically.
"Yet there is always purpose in the best work of the great writers of fiction," Beth maintained.
Not being able to deny this, he supposed sarcastically that she had read all the works to which she alluded.
"I see you suspect that I have not," she answered, smiling.
"I suspect you did not find that passage you quoted just now from Milton in his works," he rejoined.