discussion. "It's only when he sets out to be
bold and bad that he's so intolerable."

"Prather and the adjectives don't seem to match up very well," Reed
objected.

"No. That is the whole trouble; he can't live up to his ambitions. The
poor little beggar would like nothing better than to go the pace, as a
sort of experimental lap for the instruction of his characters; but he
always finds the pace too swift, and lags behind. As result, he isn't
fast, but merely skittish. In the same way, he'd like to pose as a
black-hearted villain. Instead, he gets to a point where he is just
about as unsanctified as a Sunday edition of fruit salad."

"Sunday?"

"Yes, when they chuck in all the odds and ends of wine left from the
dinners of the week. To the untrained tongue, it is a fearful pleasure
to partake thereof. Prather makes up his iniquitous debauches after the
same recipe: absorbing the yellow journals and the orange output of his
fellow novelists, going down to New York for a week end, and then
coming home to embody in a novel his consequent attack of biliousness."

"You've read his last one?"

Dolph nodded.

"And therefore I know whereof I speak," he added gloomily. "I wish the
little beggar would leave off his moving picture shows of town society,
and hie his muse once more in search of subjects from the woolly West."

"Knowing the West more than a little, I don't." Reed spoke with
decision.

"What's the harm?"

"He doesn't get within a gunshot of the truth."

"No matter. He thinks he does, and the average member of his reading
public doesn't know enough to realize the difference."

"All the worse. He ought to be sued for libel. By the way, did you know
he has been having his professional eye on me?"

"For what?"

"Copy, of course. He got to calling rather often. I must say that I
lured him on; I found his babble a distraction. Then, one day--Prather
is nothing, if not transparent--he let out the fact that he was taking
notes of me, for his next novel."

"Of all the--"

Reed interrupted.

"Not in my present ignominy, however; but as I must have been, he
explained most considerately, in my prime. He must have had good
confidence in his own imagination, though."

"Of course," Dolph said serenely. "He's always banked on that. I've
heard him telling, after any number of different dinners, what a feat
it was for him to write _A Portia of the Rockies_ when, for a fact, he
never had been farther west than