icularly.
I've not had to review it.... I'm afraid I'm hopeless about novels just
now, that's the fact. I'm sick of the form--slices of life served up cold
in three hundred pages. Oh, it's very nice; it makes nice reading for
people. But what's the use? Except, of course, to kill time for those who
prefer it dead. But as things in themselves, as art, they've been ruined
by excess. My critical sense is blunted just now. I can hardly feel the
difference, though I see it, between a good novel and a bad one. I
couldn't write one, good or bad, to save my life, I know that. And I've
got to the stage when I wish other people wouldn't. I wish every one
would shut up, so that we could hear ourselves think--like in the
Armistice Day pause, when all the noise stopped.'

Jane shook her head.

'You may be sure we shan't do that. Not likely. We all want to hear
ourselves talk. And quite right too. We've got things to say.'

'Nothing of importance. Few things that wouldn't be better unsaid. Life
isn't talking.'

'A journalist's is,' Jane pointed out, and he nodded.

'Quite true. Horribly true. It's chiefly myself I'm hitting at. But at
least we journalists don't take ourselves solemnly; we know our stuff is
babble to fill a moment. Novelists and poets don't always know that;
they're apt to think it matters. And, of course, so far as any of them
can make and hold beauty, even a fragment of it here and there, it does
matter. The trouble is that they mostly can't do anything of the sort.
They don't mostly even know how to try. All but a few verse-makers are
shallow, muddled, or sentimental, and most novelists are commercial as
well. They haven't the means; they aren't adequately equipped; they've
nothing in them worth the saying. Why say it, then? A little cleverness
isn't worth while.'

'You're morbid, Arthur.'

'Morbid? Diseased? I dare say. We most of us are. What's health, after
all? No one knows.'

'I've done eighty thousand words of my novel, anyhow.'

'I'm sorry. Nearly all novels are too long. All you've got to say would
go into forty thousand.'

'I don't write because I've got things to say. I haven't a message, like
mother. I write because it amuses me. And because I like to be a
novelist. It's done. And I like to be well spoken of--reasonably well,
that is. It's all fun. Why not?'

'Oh, don't ask _me_ why not. I can't preach sermons all the evening.'

He smiled down on her out of his long sad black eyes, glad of