'I'll bet,' said Paul rashly, 'that you haven't met this idea yet.'

'My tear poy,' Darco answered, 'if you haf cot a new way of bantling an
old itea you are ferry lucky. But there are no new iteas, and you may
take my vort for it. If anypoty asks who told you that, say it was
Cheorge Dargo.'

'Let me read it to you,' Paul urged. 'It's hardly likely that a
youngster like myself is going to have the cheek to charge _you_ with
having stolen your ideas--now, is it?' Darco smoothed a little. 'You
could tell me if there's anything in it, or if I'm wasting time.'

'Go on,' said Darco, suddenly rising from the table and hurling himself
into an arm-chair, so that the floor shuddered, and the windows of the
room danced in their panes.

Paul sipped his tea, opened his manuscript and began to read. He read on
until a loud snore reached his ears, and then looked up discouraged.

'Vot's the madder?' Darco asked. 'Go on; I am listening.'

Paul went on and Darco snored continuously, but whenever the reader
looked up at him, he was wide awake and attentive. The landlady came in
to clear the table and Darco drove her from the room as if she had
come to steal her own properties. Then he flung himself anew into his
arm-chair and snored until the reading came to a close. It had lasted
two hours and a half, and Paul at times had been affected by his own
humour and pathos. He waited with his eyes on the word 'Curtain 'at the
bottom of the final page.

'You think that is a blay?' said Darco. 'Vell, it is nod a blay. It is a
chelly.'

'I don't quite think I know what you mean,' Paul answered, horribly
crestfallen.

'I say vot I mean,' Darco responded. 'It is a chelly. It is a very goot
chelly--in' places. You might like it if you took it in a sboon out of
a storypook, or a folume of boedry; but a blay is a very different
greation.'

Then he fell to a mortally technical criticism of Paul's work--a
practical stage-manager's criticism--and enlightened his hearer's mind
on many things. He said, 'I am Cheorge Dargo, ant now you know,' a
little oftener than was necessary, but he laid bare all the weaknesses
of plot and execution--all the improbabilities which Paul supposed
himself cunningly to have effaced or bidden, and he showed him how
fatally he had disguised his budding scoundrel in a robe of goodness
throughout the whole of the first act.

'But it's life!' cried Paul. 'That's what happens in life. You meet a
man who seems made of