lieve
those were Hal Bentley's instructions--in the letter."

Mr. Quimby towered above Mr. Magee, a shirt-sleeved statue of honest
American manhood. He scowled.

"Excuse a plain question, young man," he said, "but what are you hiding
from?"

Mrs. Quimby, in the neighborhood of the stove, paused to hear the reply.
Billy Magee laughed.

"I'm not hiding," he said. "Didn't Bentley explain? Well, I'll try to,
though I'm not sure you'll understand. Sit down, Mr. Quimby. You are
not, I take it, the sort of man to follow closely the light and
frivolous literature of the day."

"What's that?" inquired Mr. Quimby.

"You don't read," continued Mr. Magee, "the sort of novels that are sold
by the pound in the department stores. Now, if you had a daughter--a
fluffy daughter inseparable from a hammock in the summer--she could help
me explain. You see--I write those novels. Wild thrilling tales for the
tired business man's tired wife--shots in the night, chases after
fortunes, Cupid busy with his arrows all over the place! It's good fun,
and I like to do it. There's money in it."

"Is there?" asked Mr. Quimby with a show of interest.

"Considerable," replied Mr. Magee. "But now and then I get a longing to
do something that will make the critics sit up--the real thing, you
know. The other day I picked up a newspaper and found my latest
brain-child advertised as 'the best fall novel Magee ever wrote'. It got
on my nerves--I felt like a literary dressmaker, and I could see my
public laying down my fall novel and sighing for my early spring styles
in fiction. I remembered that once upon a time a critic advised me to go
away for ten years to some quiet spot, and think. I decided to do it.
Baldpate Inn is the quiet spot."

"You don't mean," gasped Mr. Quimby, "that you're going to stay there
ten years?"

"Bless you, no," said Mr. Magee. "Critics exaggerate. Two months will
do. They say I am a cheap melodramatic ranter. They say I don't go deep.
They say my thinking process is a scream. I'm afraid they're right. Now,
I'm going to go up to Baldpate Inn, and think. I'm going to get away
from melodrama. I'm going to do a novel so fine and literary that Henry
Cabot Lodge will come to me with tears in his eyes and ask me to join
his bunch of self-made Immortals. I'm going to do all this up there at
the inn--sitting on the mountain and looking down on this little old
world as Jove looked down from Olympus."

"I don't know who you mea