ust be,
however crude, however improper or horrible it may seem. You would want
to hold me back."

"My dear boy, I should more than want to--I should do it. In
collaboration, no man can be a law unto himself. That must be distinctly
understood before we begin. I don't wish to force the proposition on
you. Only we are both ambitious devils. We are both poor. We are both
determined to try a book. Have we more chance of succeeding if we try
one together? I believe so. You have the imagination, the grip, the
stern power to evolve the story, to make it seem inevitable, to force
it step by step on its way. I can lighten that way. I can plant a few
flowers--they shall not be peonies, I promise you--on the roadside.
And I can, and, what is more, will, check you when you wish to make the
story impossibly horrible or fantastic to the verge of the insane. Now,
you needn't be angry. This book, if we write it, has got to be a
good book, and yet a book that will bring grist to the mill. That is
understood."

Andrew's great eyes flashed in the lamplight.

"The mill," he said. "Sometimes I feel inclined to let it stop working.
Who would care if one wheel ceased to turn? There are so many others."

"Ah, that's the sort of thing I shall cut out of the book!" cried
Henley, turning the soda-water into his whisky with a cheerful swish.

"We will be powerful, but never morbid; tragic, if you like, but not
without hope. We need not aspire too much; but we will not look at the
stones in the road all the time. And the dunghills, in which those weird
fowl, the pessimistic realists, love to rake, we will sedulously avoid.
Cheer up, old fellow, and be thankful that you possess a corrective in
me."

Trenchard's face lightened in a rare smile as, with a half-sigh, he
said:

"I believe you are right, and that I need a collaborator, an opposite,
who is yet in sympathy with me. Yes; either of us might fail alone;
together we should succeed."

"_Will_ succeed, my boy!"

"But not by pandering to the popular taste," added Andrew in his most
sombre tones, and with a curl of his thin, delicately-moulded lips. "I
shall never consent to that."

"We will not call it pandering. But we must hit the taste of the day, or
we shall look a couple of fools."

"People are always supposed to look fools when, for once, they are not
fools," said Andrew.

"Possibly. But now our bargain is made. Strike hands upon it. Henceforth
we are collaborators as well