"Why, what a simpleton you must be! There is but one subject for a novel—historical, philosophical, fashionable, antiquarian, or whatever it calls itself. The whole story, after all, is about a young man and a young woman—he all that is noble, and she all that is good. Every circulating library consists of nothing whatever but Love and Glory—and that shall be the name of my novel."
"But if you don't write it, how are you to publish it?"
"Do you think any living man or any living woman ever wrote a novel?"
"Certainly."
"Stuff, my dear fellow; they never did any thing of the kind. They published—that's all. Is that a heap of stones?"
"I think it is."
"Well, that's better than a gravel-pit. Cut her right ear. There, we're past it. Amazing bottom, has't she?"
"Too much," I said; "but go on with your novel."
"Well, my plan is simply this—but make a bet, will you? I give odds. I bet you five to one in fives, that I produce, in a week from this time, a novel called 'Love and Glory,' not of my own composition or any body else's—a good readable novel—better than any of James's—and a great deal more original."
"And yet not written by any one?"