“I mean I think you’d do the parts about the villain and that sort of thing better—don’t you?”
But as Harry was asleep again I had to take silence for consent.
The day that followed was an anxious one. It is easy enough to get your characters, but it is awful having to fix their names. And it is simple work getting a plot, compared with the agony of dividing it up into forty chapters!
This was the task before us to-day, and we retired as before to the pier-head with pencils and paper, in order to do it beyond the sound of Aunt Sarah’s voice.
We endured agonies over the names. The hero’s name should naturally have been a judicious combination of the names of the two fellows we had in our minds’ eyes. But neither “Sydrey Sproutock” nor “Hardney Hulltels” exactly pleased us. Finally we decided to call him Henry Sydney, and, strange to say, it occurred to me it would be best as a rule to speak of him by his surname, while Harry was equally strong about calling him by his Christian name. At last we agreed that when we, the authors, spoke of him it should be as Sydney, and that when the heroine or any one else mentioned his name it should be as Henry—Harry explaining that “as they’re to be kids together there won’t be anything strange in her calling him by his Christian name.” The heroine, after much searching of heart, we christened Alicia Dearlove, and the villain Sarah Vixen.
The other names we made up from a local directory which we were lucky enough to stumble across in the pavilion.
Then came the formidable work of slicing up our novel into forty pieces. We wrote the figures down the side of a long sheet of paper, and looked with something like dismay at the work we had set before us.
“Seems a lot of chapters,” said Harry; “couldn’t we make it thirty?”
“Wouldn’t run to six shillings if we did,” said I.
That settled it, and we set ourselves to fill up the blanks.