down this way."

Our friend shook hands, lingeringly, absently. Then he came to himself
with a mocking laugh. "Well, perhaps he wasn't, after all, what he
said."

XVIII

A NIECE'S LITERARY ADVICE TO HER UNCLE

A Veteran Novelist, who was also an intimate friend of the Easy Chair's,
sat before his desk pensively supporting his cheek in his left hand
while his right toyed with the pen from which, for the moment at least,
fiction refused to flow. His great-niece, who seemed such a
contradiction in terms, being as little and vivid personally as she was
nominally large and stately, opened the door and advanced upon him.

"Do I disturb you, uncle?" she asked; she did not call him great-uncle,
because that, she rightly said, was ridiculous; and now, as part of the
informality, she went on without waiting for him to answer, "Because,
you know, you wanted me to tell you what I thought of your last story;
and I've just read it."

"Oh yes!" the Veteran Novelist assented brightly, hiding his struggle to
recall which story it was. "Well?"

"Well," she said, firmly but kindly, "you want me to be frank with you,
don't you?"

"By all means, my dear. It's very good of you to read my story." By this
time, he had, with the help of the rather lean volume into which his
publishers had expanded a long-short story, and which she now held
intensely clasped to her breast, really remembered.

"Not at all!" she said. She sat down very elastically in the chair on
the other side of his desk, and as she talked she accented each of her
emotions by a spring from the cushioned seat. "In the first place," she
said, with the effect of coming directly to business, "I suppose you
know yourself that it couldn't be called virile."

"No?" he returned. "What is virile?"

"Well, I can't explain, precisely; but it's something that all the
critics say of a book that is very strong, don't you know; and
masterful; and relentless; and makes you feel as if somebody had taken
you by the throat; and shakes you up awfully; and seems to throw you
into the air, and trample you under foot."

"Good heavens, my dear!" the Veteran Novelist exclaimed. "I hope I'm a
gentleman, even when I'm writing a novel."

"Your being a gentleman has nothing to do with it, uncle!" she said,
severely, for she thought she perceived a disposition in the Veteran
Novelist to shuffle. "You can't be virile and at the same time remember
that you are a gentleman. Lots of _w