“Are you quite sure you won’t be stronger by the end of this interview?”
“Oh, is this an interview? Ah, why be formal and boring? Why stable the steed after the horse—I mean the novel is out? It will be a huge success, so your enemies predict. Frederick Cook of The Bittern writes me that this, the latest output of a militant aristocracy, seeking to beat us with our own weapons, is chockful of cleverness and primitive woman. What more do you want?”
“D. the novel! I want you!” she said, stamping her foot.
“Oh, throw away the fugitive husk and the rind outworn—the creed forgotten—the deed forborne—how does it go? Give a poor author a chance, now that you have sucked his commonplace book dry, and torn the heart out of his theories, butchered him to make a literary agent’s holiday.”
“You are unkind.”
“Don’t say that. It is unworthy of you. Stale! like the plot of the new novel you propose we should work out together.”
“I am prepared to go all lengths to assert——”
“Your powers of imagination. I don’t doubt it. But I have been thinking it over, and I find it a ghastly, an impossible plot. No, it would never do, not even if we made a motor-motif of it. It won’t go on all fours. It would not even begin to sell. It has none of the elements of popularity. To begin and end with, there’s not an atom of passion about it, not even so much as would lie on twenty thousand pounds of radium, and you know how much that is!”
“Don’t imply that I am incapable of passion in that insulting way!” she said quite angrily. “It shall never be said——”
“It will never be said, unless we run away and apply the test of Boulogne and social ostracism. Believe me, Paquerette, things are best as they are—going to be. There’s true evolution in it. When the feast is over, you put out the fluttering candles, tear down the wreaths, open the windows. When the novel is done——”