er waiting a decent time she went to find
him in his critical bookstore. It was late in an afternoon of the days
that were getting longer, and only one electric was lighted in the
rear of the room, where Erlcort sat before the fireless Franklin
stove, so busy at something that he scarcely seemed aware of her.

"What in the world are you doing?" she demanded.

He looked up. "Who? I? Oh, it's you! Why, I'm merely censoring the
truck in the May number of this magazine." He held up a little roller,
as long as the magazine was wide, blacked with printer's ink, which he
had been applying to the open periodical. "I've taken a hint from the
way the Russian censorship blots out seditious literature before it
lets it go to the public."

"And _what_ a mess you're making!"

"Of course it will have to dry before it's put on sale."

"I should think so. Listen to me, Frederick Erlcort: you're going
crazy."

"I've sometimes thought so: crazy with conceit and vanity and
arrogance. Who am I that I should set up for a critical
bookstore-keeper? What is the Republic of Letters, anyway? A vast,
benevolent, generous democracy, where one may have what one likes, or
a cold oligarchy where he is compelled to take what is good for him?
Is it a restricted citizenship, with a minority representation, or is
it universal suffrage?"

"Now," Margaret Green said, "you are talking sense. Why didn't you
think of this in the beginning?"

"Is it a world, a whole earth," he went on, "where the weeds mostly
outflourish the flowers, or is it a wretched little florist's
conservatory where the watering-pot assumes to better the instruction
of the rain which falls upon the just and the unjust? What is all the
worthy family of asses to do if there are no thistles to feed them?
Because the succulent fruits and nourishing cereals are better for the
finer organisms, are the coarser not to have fodder? No; I have made a
mistake. Literature is the whole world; it is the expression of the
gross, the fatuous, and the foolish, and it is the pleasure of the
gross, the fatuous, and the foolish, as well as the expression and the
pleasure of the wise, the fine, the elect. Let the multitude have
their truck, their rubbish, their rot; it may not be the truck, the
rubbish, the rot that it would be to us, or may slowly and by natural
selection become to certain of them. But let there be no artificial
selection, no survival of the fittest by main force--the force of the