essimistically
insist that all of us elect to love one person and to hate another with
very much the same enthusiasm that we display in expressing a preference
for rare roast beef as compared with the outside slice. Oh, really,
Rudolph, you have no notion how salutary it is to the self-esteem of us
romanticists to run across, even nowadays, an occasional breach of the
peace. For then sometimes--when the coachman obligingly cuts the
butler's throat in the back-alley, say--we actually presume to think for
a moment that our profession is almost as honest as that of making
counterfeit money...."

The colonel did not interrupt his brief pause of meditation. Then the
novelist said:

"Why, no; if I were ever really to attempt a tale of Lichfield, I would
not write a romance but a tragedy. I think that I would call my tragedy
_Futility_, for it would mirror the life of Lichfield with unengaging
candor; and, as a consequence, people would complain that my tragedy
lacked sustained interest, and that its participants were inconsistent;
that it had no ordered plot, no startling incidents, no high endeavors,
and no especial aim; and that it was equally deficient in all
time-hallowed provocatives of either laughter or tears. For very few
people would understand that a life such as this, when rightly viewed,
is the most pathetic tragedy conceivable."

"Oh, come, now, Jack! come, recollect that your reasoning powers are
almost as worthy of employment as your rhetorical abilities! We are not
quite so bad as that, you know. We may be a little behind the times in
Lichfield; we certainly let well enough alone, and we take things pretty
much as they come; but we meddle with nobody, and, after all, we don't
do any especial harm."

"We don't do anything whatever in especial, Rudolph. That would be
precisely the theme of my story of the real Lichfield if I were ever
bold enough to write it. There seems to be a sort of blight upon
Lichfield. Oh, yes! it would be unfair, perhaps, to contrast it with the
bigger Southern cities, like Richmond and Atlanta and New Orleans; but
even the inhabitants of smaller Southern towns are beginning to buy
excursion tickets, and thereby ascertain that the twentieth century has
really begun. Yes, it is only in Lichfield I can detect the raw stuff of
a genuine tragedy; for, depend upon it, Rudolph, the most pathetic
tragedy in life is to get nothing in particular out of it."

"But, for my part, I don't see w