e
slave at wretched articles and come home to hear more literature and
more appreciations, and the unholy women do nothing and attend to
local government, that is, the oppression of the poor; and altogether
this accursed everyday life of theirs is instinct with the four sins
crying to heaven for vengeance, and there is no humanity in it, and no
simplicity, and no recollection. I know whole quarters of the towns of
that life where they have never heard of Virtus or Verecundia or
Pietas.

LECTOR. Then--

AUCTOR. Alas! alas! Dear Lector, in these houses there is no honest
dust. Not a bottle of good wine or bad; no prints inherited from
one's uncle, and no children's books by Mrs Barbauld or Miss
Edgeworth; no human disorder, nothing of that organic comfort which
makes a man's house like a bear's fur for him. They have no debts,
they do not read in bed, and they will have difficulty in saving their
souls.

LECTOR. Then tell me, how would you treat of common things?

AUCTOR. Why, I would leave them alone; but if I had to treat of them I
will show you how I would do it. Let us have a dialogue about this
road from Moutier.

LECTOR. By all means.

AUCTOR. What a terrible thing it is to miss one's sleep. I can hardly
bear the heat of the road, and my mind is empty!

LECTOR. Why, you have just slept in a wood!

AUCTOR. Yes, but that is not enough. One must sleep at night.

LECTOR. My brother often complains of insomnia. He is a policeman.

AUCTOR. Indeed? It is a sad affliction.

LECTOR. Yes, indeed.

AUCTOR. Indeed, yes.

LECTOR. I cannot go on like this.

AUCTOR. There. That is just what I was saying. One cannot treat of
common things: it is not literature; and for my part, if I were the
editor even of a magazine, and the author stuck in a string of
dialogue, I would not pay him by the page but by the word, and I would
count off 5 per cent for epigrams, 10 per cent for dialect, and some
quarter or so for those stage directions in italics which they use to
pad out their work.

So. I will not repeat this experiment, but next time I come to a bit
of road about which there is nothing to say, I will tell a story or
sing a song, and to that I pledge myself.

By the way, I am reminded of something. Do you know those books and
stories in which parts of the dialogues often have no words at all?
Only dots and dashes and asterisks and interrogations? I wonder what
the people are paid for it? If I knew I would earn