ou mean?"

"I mean what I say."

"Please explain."

"Very well. Since you so earnestly desire my honest and candid opinion,
you shall have it. You remind me that I praised your earlier work, and
suggest my inconsistency in not approving of your latest. My praise was
sincere. I thought, and I have never changed my opinion, that the
originality of your first books amounted to genius. Your last, however
great its other qualities, has not that merit. It is, _I_ think,
conspicuously destitute of imagination."

"Do you deny its vitality--its faithfulness to nature?"

"Certainly not. I object to it as a barefaced plagiarism from nature."

"Then at least you'll admit that my heroine lives?"

"She does, unfortunately. Wouldn't it have been better taste to wait
till she was decently dead?"

"Oh--I see. You mean _that_."

"Yes; I mean that. If you had no respect for your own reputation, you
might have thought of Miss Craven's."

"Excuse me, this is simply irrelevant nonsense, and most unworthy of
you. Miss Craven, as you perfectly well know, is one manifestation of
the eternal flirt. I seized on the type she belongs to, and
individualised it."

"You did nothing of the sort. You seized on the individual and put her
into type--a very different thing. Do you imagine that life will ever be
the same to that poor woman again? I never liked Miss Craven, but she
was harmless, even nice, before you got hold of her and spoilt her, by
making her think herself clever. Isn't that what happens to Laura?"

"That--among other things."

"Other things, also slavishly copied from Miss Craven. I recognise the
faithfulness of your portraiture in all its details; so does she and
everybody else."

"Knowles, you talk like the lay fool. Surely you know how all fiction,
worthy of the name, is made? I took what lay nearest at hand, as
hundreds of novelists have done before me; though as for that, there's
not an incident in the book that is not the purest fiction. You don't
give me credit--I won't say for originality, but--for ordinary
reconstructive ability."

"I give you credit for having made the most of quite exceptional
advantages. You best know how you obtained them."

Wyndham reflected a moment, then looked Knowles in the face.

"I assure you solemnly there was never any question of Miss Craven's
honour."

Knowles raised his eyebrows. "I didn't suppose for a moment there was.
How about your own, though? Your notions of honour s