, after the youth had gone, he seized the
roll of manuscript, for the purpose of glancing through it. If he had
imagined the story of any merit, he would not have been in such haste;
but as his best friend had introduced the writer, he thought he would
like to get a disagreeable task over at once.

He glanced the story through. Then he read it carefully. Then he slammed
it down hard on his desk--to the vast confusion of some hundreds of
loose memoranda, which didn't matter much, anyway--and uttered a big,
bad word. The sentences in the story were short and crisp. The
adjectives were served very hot indeed. There was not a single bit of
poetic connotation. It described life as it really was.

Brown, the editor, published the story, and paid a good price for it.
Severne, the author, wrote more stories, and sold them to Brown. The two
men got to be very good friends, and Severne heard exactly how Brown
liked short stories and why, and how his, Severne's, stories were just
that kind.

All this would have been quite an ideal condition of affairs, and an
object-lesson to a harsh world and other editors, were it not that
Severne was serious-minded. He had absolutely no sense of humour.
Perspectives there were none for him, and due proportions did not exist.
He took life hard. He looked upon himself gravely as a serious
proposition, like the Nebular Hypothesis or Phonetic Reform. The
immediate consequence was that, having achieved his success through
realism, he placed realism on a pedestal and worshipped it as the only
true (literary) god. Severne became a realist of realists. He ran it
into the ground. He would not describe a single incident that he had not
viewed from start to finish with his own eyes. He did not have much to
do with feelings _direct_, but such as were necessary to his story he
insisted on experiencing in his own person; otherwise the story remained
unwritten. And as for emotions--such as anger, or religion, or fear--he
would attempt none whose savour he had not tasted for himself. Unkind
and envious rivals--not realists--insisted that once Severne had
deliberately gotten very drunk on Bowery whiskey in order that he might
describe the sensations of one of his minor characters in such a
condition. Certain it is, he soon gained the reputation among the
unintelligent of being a crazy individual, who paid people remarkably
well to do strange and meaningless things for him. He was always
experimenting on hims