asked if I had observed your work in the literary
department of _The Gazette_. I admitted demurely that I had. He praised
several reviews (all written by me!) particularly, and said that you were
the only critic in America now who was telling the truth about modern
fiction. Then he incensed me with this final comment:

"I do not understand how he does this newspaper work so forcefully, almost
savagely, and is at the same time capable of writing such delicate,
scholarly essays as this volume contains!"

"I have seen Mr. Towers," I remarked, mentally determining that you should
suffer for that distinction.

"Indeed! what manner of man is he?"

"His dust has congealed, stiffened into a sort of plaster-of-Paris
exterior, and he has what I call a _disinterred_ intelligence!"

"A what?"

"A man whose very personality is a kind of mental reservation, and whose
intelligence has been resurrected up through the thought and philosophy of
three thousand years."

M---- looked awkward but impressed.

And I hoped he would ask how you actually looked, for I was in the mood to
give a perfectly God-fearing description of you.

But from the foregoing you will see that I am capable of sharing your
literary glory on the sly, and without compunction. Indeed, the false role
created in me a perverse mood. And I entered into a literary discussion
with M---- that outraged his pedantic soul. It was my way of perjuring his
judgment, in return for his unwitting approval of my reviews. Besides, the
assumption of infallibility by dull, scholarly men who have neither
imagination nor genius has always amused me. And this one danced now as
frantically as if he had unintentionally grasped a live wire that hurt and
burned, but would not let go! Finally I said very engagingly:

"Doctor M----, I hope to improve in these matters by taking a course of
instruction under you next year."

"Now God forbid that you should ever do such a thing, Miss Doane! I would
sooner have you thrust dynamite under the chair of English Literature,
than see you in one of my classes!"

Thus am I cast upon the barren primer commons of this cold world! And that
reminds me to say that I have been reading the essays by Arnold and
Brownell which you gave me, with no little animosity. Brownell's criticism
of Thackeray is very suggestive, and brushes away a deal of trash that has
been written about his lack of artistic method. But I never supposed such
loose sentences woul