omptly announced. "I never
did want one, for I don't believe they were as exciting as we imagine.
And I hate literary people almost as much as I hate actors. I always
felt they were like stage-scenery, not made for close inspection. For
after five winters in New York and a couple in London you can't help
bumping into the Bohemian type, not to mention an occasional collision
with 'em up and down the Continent. When they're female they always seem
to wear the wrong kind of corsets. And when they're male they watch
themselves in the mirrors, or talk so much about themselves that you
haven't a chance to talk about _yourself_--which is really the
completest definition of a bore, isn't it? I'd much rather know them
through their books than through those awful Sunday evening _soirees_
where poor old leonine M---- used to perspire reading those Socialist
poems of his to the adoring ladies, and Sanguinary John used to wear the
same flannel shirt that shielded him from the Polar blasts up in
Alaska--open at the throat, and all that sort of thing, just like a
movie-actor cowboy, only John had grown a little stout and he kept
spoiling the Strong-Man picture by so everlastingly posing at one end
of the grand-piano! You know the way they do it, one pensive elbow on
the piano-end and the delicately drooping palm holding up the weary
brains, the same as you prop up a King-orange bough when it gets too
heavy with fruit! And then he had a lovely bang and a voice like a
maiden-lady from Maine. And take it from me, O lord and master, that man
devoured all his raw beef and blood on his typewriter-ribbon. I dubbed
him the King of the Eye-Socket school, and instead of getting angry he
actually thanked me for it. That was the sort of advertising he was
after."

Dinky-Dunk grinned a little as I rattled on. Then he grew serious again.
"Why is it," he asked, "a writer in Westminster Abbey is always a
genius, but a writer in the next room is rather a joke?"

I tried to explain it for him. "Because writers are like Indians. The
only good ones are the dead ones. And it's the same with those siren
affinities of history. Annie Laurie lived to be eighty, though the
ballad doesn't say so. And Lady Hamilton died poor and ugly and went
around with red herrings in her pocket. And Cleopatra was really a
redheaded old political schemer, and Paris got tired of Helen of Troy.
Which means that history, like literature, is only _Le mensonge
convenu_!"

This