.

He glanced over his shoulder at the bureau where her papers were
spread. "I shall get you to let me see some of your work," he said,
"and then I can judge of its worth."

"What have you done yourself?" she asked.

"I--well, I write regularly for the _Patriarch_," he said, with the
complacency of one who thinks that he need say no more. "The editor
himself came to stay with us last week, and that means something. Just
now, however, I am contemplating a work of fiction, an important work,
if I may venture to say so myself. It has been on my mind for years."

"Indeed," said Beth. "What is its purpose?"

"Purpose!" he ejaculated. "Had you said pur-port instead of pur-pose,
it would have been a sensible question. It is hardly likely I shall
write a novel with a purpose. I leave that to the ladies."

"I have read somewhere that Milton said the poet's mission was '_to
allay the perturbation of the mind and set the affections in right
tune_,'--is not that a purpose?" Beth asked. "And one in our own day
has talked of '_that great social duty to impart what we believe and
what we think we have learned. Among the few things of which we can
pronounce ourselves certain is the obligation of inquirers after truth
to communicate what they obtain._'"

"But not in the form of fiction," Alfred Cayley Pounce put in
dogmatically.

"Yet there is always purpose in the best work of the great writers of
fiction," Beth maintained.

Not being able to deny this, he supposed sarcastically that she had
read all the works to which she alluded.

"I see you suspect that I have not," she answered, smiling.

"I suspect you did not find that passage you quoted just now from
Milton in his works," he rejoined.

"I said as much," she reminded him.

"Well, but you ought to know better than to quote an author you have
not read," he informed her.

"Do you mean that I should read all a man's works before I presume to
quote a single passage?"

"I do," he replied. "Women never understand thoroughness," he
observed, largely.

"Some of us see a difference between thoroughness and niggling," Beth
answered. "I should say, beware of endless preparation! We have heard
of Mr. Casaubon and _The Key to all Mythologies_."

"I understand now what your friend Mrs. Carne meant about the manner
in which you take advice," Mr. Alfred Cayley Pounce informed her, in a
slightly offended tone.

Beth, wondering inwardly why so many people assume they are com