"no one in his senses
would leave a comfortable city house to go and lie out in a marsh at
night, in a forty-mile gale, with the mercury at ten, unless he had some
other motive than the thing itself--ducks, or conspiracy, or something.
And yet it is the thing itself that is the real reward."

"Isn't that true of almost everything?" said Jonathan.

XVI

Comfortable Books

Jonathan methodically tucked his bookmark into "The Virginians," and,
closing the fat green volume, began to knock the ashes out of his pipe
against the bricked sides of the fireplace.

"'The Virginians' is a very comfortable sort of book," he remarked.

"Is it?" I said. "I wonder why."

He ruminated. "Well, chiefly, I suppose, because it's so good and long.
You get to know all the people, you get used to their ways, and when
they turn up again, after a lot of chapters, you don't have to find out
who they are--you just feel comfortably acquainted."

I sighed. I had just finished a magazine story--condensed, vivid,
crushing a whole life-tragedy into seven pages and a half. In that space
I had been made acquainted with sixteen different characters, seven
principal ones and the rest subordinate, but all clearly drawn. I had
found it interesting, stimulating; as a _tour de force_ it was
noteworthy even among the crowd of short-stories--all condensed, all
vivid, all interesting--that had appeared that month. But--comfortable?
No. And I felt envious of Jonathan. He had been reading "The Virginians"
all winter. His bookmark was at page 597, and there were 803 pages in
all, so he had a great deal of comfort left.

Perhaps comfort is not quite all that one should expect from one's
reading. Certainly it is the last thing one gets from the perusal of our
current literature, and any one who reads nothing else is missing
something which, whether he realizes it or not, he ought for his soul's
sake to have--something which Jonathan roughly indicated when he called
it "comfort." The ordinary reader devours short-stories by the dozen, by
the score--short short-stories, long short-stories, even short-stories
laboriously expanded to a volume, but still short-stories. He glances,
less frequently, at verses, chiefly quatrains, at columns of jokes, at
popularized bits of history and science, at bits of anecdotal
biography, and nowhere in all this medley does he come in contact with
what is large and leisurely. Current literature is like a garden I once
saw