take your positive qualities
for granted. In fact, we will not discuss you at all.... What is her
name?'

"'Bennett.'

"'Bennett? Wilhelmina Bennett? The daughter of Mr. Rufus Bennett? The
red-haired girl I met at lunch one day at your father's house?'

"'That's it. You're a great guesser. I think you ought to stop the
thing.'

"'I intend to.'

"'Fine!'

"'The marriage would be unsuitable in every way. Miss Bennett and my son
do not vibrate on the same plane.'

"That's right. I've noticed it myself.'

"'Their auras are not the same colour.'

"'If I thought that once,' said Bream Mortimer, ''I've thought it a
hundred times. I wish I had a dollar for every time I thought it. Not the
same colour! That's the whole thing in a nutshell.'"

Mr. Wodehouse is described by a friend as "now a somewhat fluid inhabitant
of England, running over here spasmodically. Last summer he bought a
race-horse. It is the beginning of the end!"

CHAPTER VII

THE VITALITY OF MARY ROBERTS RINEHART

=i=

"The total result ... after twelve years is that I have learned to sit
down at my desk and begin work simultaneously," wrote Mrs. Rinehart in
1917. "One thing died, however, in those years of readjustment and
struggle. That was my belief in what is called 'inspiration.' I think I
had it now and then in those days, moments when I felt things I had hardly
words for, a breath of something much bigger than I was, a little lift in
the veil.

"It does not come any more.

"Other things bothered me in those first early days. I seemed to have so
many things to write about and writing was so difficult. Ideas came, but
no words to clothe them. Now, when writing is easy, when the technique of
my work bothers me no more than the pen I write with, I have less to say.

[Illustration: MARY ROBERTS RINEHART]

"I have words, but fewer ideas to clothe in them. And, coming more and
more often is the feeling that, before I have commenced to do my real
work, I am written out; that I have for years wasted my substance in
riotous writing and that now, when my chance is here, when I have lived
and adventured, when, if ever, I am to record honestly my little page of
these great times in which I live, now I shall fail."

These surprising words appeared in an article in the American Magazine for
1917. Not many months later _The Amazing Interlude_ was published and,
quoting Mrs. Rinehart soon afterward, I said: "If her readers shared this
fee