le speck! It's rather a delicate point,
and I don't exactly know how to put it, but, if you want me to be frank,
I must." She looked at her great-uncle, and he nodded encouragement. "I
don't believe there's a single place where he crushes her to his heart,
or presses his lips to hers in a long kiss. He kisses her cheek once,
but I don't call that anything. Why, in lots of the books, nowadays, the
girls themselves cling to the men in a close embrace, or put their
mouths tenderly to theirs--Well, of course, it sounds rather disgusting,
but in your own earlier books, I'm sure there's more of it--of passion.
Isn't there? Think!"

The Veteran Novelist tried to think. "To tell you the truth, my dear, I
can't remember. I hope there was, and there always will be, love, and
true love, in my novels--the kind that sometimes ends in happy marriage,
but is always rather shy of showing itself off to the reader in caresses
of any kind. I think passion can be intimated, and is better so than
brutally stated. If you have a lot of hugging and kissing--"

"Uncle!"

"--How are your lovers different from those poor things in the Park that
make you ashamed as you pass them?"

"The police ought to put a stop to it. They are perfectly disgraceful!"

"And they ought to put a stop to it in the novels. It's not only
indecent, but it's highly insanitary. Nice people don't want you to kiss
their children, nowadays, and yet they expect us novelists to supply
them with passion of the most demonstrative sort in our fiction. Among
the Japanese, who are now one of the great world-powers, kissing is
quite unknown in real life. I don't know the Japanese fiction very well,
but I doubt whether there's a single kiss, or double, in it. I believe
that a novel full of intense passion could be written without the help
of one embrace from beginning to end."

"Uncle!" the girl vividly exclaimed, "why don't you _do_ it? It would be
the greatest success! Just give them the wink, somehow, at the
start--just hint that there was the greatest kind of passion going on
all the time and never once showing itself, and the girls would be
raving about it. Why _don't_ you do it, uncle? You know I do so want
you, for once, to write the most popular book of the month!"

"I want to do it myself, my dear. But as to my writing a book full of
suppressed passion, that's a story in itself."

"Tell it!" she entreated.

"The Easy Chair wouldn't give me room for it. But I'll te