oman. I see in some of the modern novels we have been talking of the
same unscrupulous daring, a blindness to moral distinctions, a constant
exaltation of a passion into a virtue, an entire disregard of the
immutable laws on which the family and society rest. And you ask lawyers
and trustees how scrupulous women are in business transactions!

THE FIRE-TENDER. Women are often ignorant of affairs, and, besides, they
may have a notion often that a woman ought to be privileged more than
a man in business matters; but I tell you, as a rule, that if men
would consult their wives, they would go a deal straighter in business
operations than they do go.

THE PARSON. We are all poor sinners. But I've another indictment against
the women writers. We get no good old-fashioned love-stories from them.
It's either a quarrel of discordant natures one a panther, and the other
a polar bear--for courtship, until one of them is crippled by a railway
accident; or a long wrangle of married life between two unpleasant
people, who can neither live comfortably together nor apart. I suppose,
by what I see, that sweet wooing, with all its torturing and delightful
uncertainty, still goes on in the world; and I have no doubt that the
majority of married people live more happily than the unmarried. But
it's easier to find a dodo than a new and good love-story.

MANDEVILLE. I suppose the old style of plot is exhausted. Everything in
man and outside of him has been turned over so often that I should think
the novelists would cease simply from want of material.

THE PARSON. Plots are no more exhausted than men are. Every man is a new
creation, and combinations are simply endless. Even if we did not have
new material in the daily change of society, and there were only a
fixed number of incidents and characters in life, invention could not be
exhausted on them. I amuse myself sometimes with my kaleidoscope, but
I can never reproduce a figure. No, no. I cannot say that you may not
exhaust everything else: we may get all the secrets of a nature into a
book by and by, but the novel is immortal, for it deals with men.

The Parson's vehemence came very near carrying him into a sermon; and
as nobody has the privilege of replying to his sermons, so none of the
circle made any reply now.

Our Next Door mumbled something about his hair standing on end, to hear
a minister defending the novel; but it did not interrupt the general
silence. Silence is unnoticed