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The Duke reeled with all the abandon of a squirrel in a wheel.

"Dearest," said Mrs. John Smith to her petrified mother, "we will see you soon at Verbena. And don't let Dad over-play that fish. He always over-plays a salmon, you know."

The Duchess folded her fat hands and watched her departing offspring until the chartered launch was a speck on the horizon. Then she looked at her husband.

"Fancy!" she said.

"Nevertheless," remarked the youthful novelist, coldly, "there is nothing on earth as ignoble as a best-seller."

"I wonder," ventured Duane, "whether you know which books actually do sell the best."

"Or which books of bygone days were the best-sellers?"

"Some among them are still best-sellers," added Athalie.

"A truly important book – " began the novelist, but Athalie interrupted him:

"O solemn child," she said, "write on! – and thank the gods for their important gifts to you of hand and mind! So that you keep tired eyes awake that otherwise would droop to brood on pain or sorrow you have done well; and what you have written to this end will come nearer being important than anything you ever write."

"True, by the nine muses!" exclaimed Stafford with emphasis. Athalie glanced at him out of sweetly humourous eyes.

"There is a tenth muse," she said. "Did you never hear of her?"

"Never! Where did you discover her, Athalie?"

"Where I discover many, many things, my friend."

"In your crystal?" I said. She nodded slowly while the sweetmeat was dissolving in her mouth.

Through the summer silence a bell here and there in the dusky city sounded the hour.

"The tenth muse," she repeated, "and I believe there are other sisters, also. Many a star is suspected before its unseen existence is proven… Please – a glass of water?"

XII

She sipped the water pensively as we all returned to our places. Then, placing the partly empty glass beside her jar of sweetmeats, she opened her incomparable lips.

It is a fine thing when a young man, born to travel the speedway of luxury, voluntarily leaves it to hew out a pathway for himself through life. Brown thought so, too. And at twenty-four he resolutely graduated from Harvard, stepped out into the world, and looked about him very sternly.

All was not well with the world. Brown knew it. He was there to correct whatever was wrong. And he had chosen Good Literature as the vehicle for self expression.

Now, the nine sister goddesses are born flirts; and every one of them immediately glanced sideways at Brown, who was a nice young man with modesty, principles, and a deep and reverent belief in Good Literature.

The nine daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne seemed very attractive to him until the tenth and most recent addition to the Olympian family sauntered by with a flirt of her narrow skirt – the jade!

One glance into the starry blue wells of her baby eyes bowled him over. Henceforth she was to be his steady – Thalomene, a casual daughter of Zeus, and muse of all that is sacredly obvious in the literature of modern realism.

From early infancy Brown's had been a career of richest promise. His mother's desk was full of his earlier impressions of life. He had, in course of time, edited his school paper, his college paper; and, as an undergraduate, he had appeared in the contributor's columns of various periodicals.

His was not only a wealthy but a cultivated lineage as well. The love of literature was born in him.

To love literature is all right in its way; to love it too well is to mistake the appreciative for the creative genius. Reverence and devotion are no equipment for creative authorship. It is not enough to have something to say about what other people have said. And the inspiration which comes from what others have done is never the true one. But Brown didn't know these things. They were not revealed unto him at Harvard; no inward instinct made them plain to him.

He began by foregathering with authors. Many, many authors foregather, from various causes – tradition, inclination, general shiftlessness. When they do that they produce a sort of serum called literary atmosphere, which is said to be delightful. And so Brown found it. However, there are authors who seem to be too busy with their profession to foregather and exhale atmosphere. But these are doubtless either literary hacks or the degraded producers of best-sellers. They are not authors, either; they are merely writers.

Now, in all the world there is only one thing funnier than an author; and that is a number of them. But Brown didn't know that, either.

All authors are reformers. Said one of them to Brown in the Empyrean Club:

"When an author in his own heart ceases to be a reformer he begins to be a menace!"

It was a fine sentiment, and Brown wrote it in his note-book. Afterward, the more he analyzed it the less it seemed to mean.

Another author informed him that the proper study for man is man. He'd heard that before, but the repetition steeled his resolve. And his resolve was to reproduce in literature exactly what he observed about him; nothing more, nothing less.

There was to be no concession to imagination, none to convention, none to that insidious form of human weakness known as good taste. As for art, Brown already knew what Art really was.

There was art enough for anybody in sheer truth, enough in the realism made up of photographic detail, recorded uncompromisingly in ordered processional sequence. After all, there was really no beauty in the world except the beauty of absolute truth. All other alleged beauty was only some form of weakness. Thus Brown, after inhaling literary atmosphere.

Like the majority of young men, Brown realised that only a man, and a perfectly fearless, honest, and unprejudiced one, was properly equipped to study woman and tell the entire truth about her in literature.

So he began his first great novel – "The Unquiet Sex" – and he made heavy weather of it that autumn – what with contributing to the literary atmosphere every afternoon and evening at various clubs and cafés – not to mention the social purlieus into which he ventured with the immortal lustre already phosphorescent on his brow. Which left him little time for mere writing. It is hard to be an author and a writer, too.

The proper study for man being woman, Brown studied her solemnly and earnestly. He studied his mother and his sisters, boring them to the verge of distraction; he attempted to dissect the motives which governed the behaviour of assorted feminine relatives, scaring several of the more aged and timorous, agitating others, and infuriating one or two – until his father ordered him to desist.

House-maids, parlour-maids, ladies'-maids, waitresses, all fought very shy of him; for true to his art, he had cast convention aside and had striven to fathom the souls and discover the hidden motives imbedded in Milesian, Scandinavian and Briton.

"The thing for me to do," said Brown rather bitterly to his father, "is to go out into the world and investigate far and wide."

"Investigate what?" asked his father.

"Woman!" said Brown sturdily.

"There's only one trouble about that."

"What's that?"

"Woman," said his father, "is likely to do the investigating. This household knows more about you than you do about it."

Brown smiled. So did his father.

"Son," said the latter, "what have you learned about women without knowing anything about them?"

"Nothing, naturally," said Brown.

"Then you will never have anything more than that to say about them," remarked Brown senior.

"Why not?"