h.

V

THE SAVING GRACE

Once upon a time there was an editor of a magazine who had certain ideas
concerning short stories. This is not wonderful, for editors have such
ideas; and when they find a short story which corresponds, they accept
it with joy and pay good sums for it. This particular editor believed
that a short story should be realistic. "Let us have things as they
_are_!" he was accustomed to cry to his best friend, or the printer's
devil, or the office cat, whichever happened to be the handiest. "Life
is great enough to say things for itself, without having to be helped
out by the mawkish sentimentality of an idiot! Permit us to see actual
people, living actual lives, in actual houses, and I should hope we have
common-sense enough to draw our own morals!" He usually made these
chaotic exclamations after reading through several pages of very neat
manuscript in which the sentences were long and involved, and in which
were employed polysyllabic adjectives of a poetic connotation. This
editor liked short, crisp sentences. He wanted his adjectives served
hot. He despised poetic connotation. Being only an editor, his name was
Brown. If he had been a writer, he would have had three names, beginning
with successive letters of the alphabet.

Now, one day, it happened that there appeared before this editor, Brown,
a young man bearing a roll of manuscript. How he had gotten by the
office boy Brown could not conceive, and rolled manuscript usually gave
him spasms. The youth, however, presented a letter of introduction from
Brown's best friend. He said he had a story to submit, and he said it
with a certain appearance of breathlessness at the end of the sentence,
which showed Brown that it was his first story. Brown frowned inwardly,
and smiled outwardly. He begged the youth to take a seat. As all the
seats were filled with unopened papers and unbound books, the youth said
he preferred to stand.

Brown asked the youth questions, in a perfunctory manner, not because he
cared to know anything about him, but because he liked the man who had
written the letter. The youth's name proved to be Severne, and he was
the most serious-minded youth who had ever stepped from college into
writing. He spoke of ideals. Brown concluded that the youth's story
probably dealt with the time of the Chaldaean astronomers, and contained
a deep symbolical truth, couched in language of the school of Bulwer
Lytton or Marie Corelli. So