Nemesis gets busy with a gun and kind Providence hitches 'em up in
ever-after blocks of two. It takes a rotten novelist to use a gun on his
villains! It's never done in decent literature--never done anywhere
except in real life."

He swallowed his coffee and, lighting a cigarette, tipped back his
chair, balancing himself with one hand on the table.

"The use of the gun," he said lazily, "is obsolete in the modern novel;
the theme now is, how to be passionate though pure. Personally, being
neither one nor the other, I remain uninterested in the modern novel."

"Real life," said Portlaw, spearing a fish-ball, "is damn monotonous.
The only gun-play is in the morning papers."

"Sure," nodded Malcourt, "and there's too many shooting items in 'em
every day to make gun-play available for a novel.... Once, when I
thought I could write--just after I left college--they took me aboard a
morning newspaper on the strength of a chance I had to discover a
missing woman.

"She was in hiding; her name had been horribly spattered in a divorce,
and the poor thing was in hiding--had changed her name, crept off to a
little town in Delaware.

"Our enlightened press was hunting for her; to find her was termed a
'scoop,' I believe.... Well--boys pull legs off grasshoppers and do
other damnable things without thinking.... I found _her_.... So as I
knocked at her door--in the mean little farmhouse down there in
Delaware--she opened it, smiling--she was quite pretty--and blew her
brains out in my very face."

"Wh-what!" bawled Portlaw, dropping knife and fork.

"I--I want to see that girl again--some time," said Malcourt
thoughtfully. "I would like to tell her that I didn't mean it--case of
boy and grasshopper, you know.... Well, as you say, gun-play has no
place in real novels. There wouldn't be room, anyway, with all the
literature and illustrations and purpose and purple preciousness; as
anachronismatically superfluous as sleigh-bells in hell."

Portlaw resumed his egg; Malcourt considered him ironically.

"Sporty Porty, are you going to wed the Pretty Lady of Pride's Hall at
Pride's Fall some blooming day in June?"

"None of your infernal business!"

"Quite so. I only wanted to see how the novel was coming out before
somebody takes the book away from me."

"You talk like a pint of shoe-strings," growled Portlaw; "you'd better
find out whose horse has been denting the lawn all over and tearing off
several yards of sod."

"I k