a cold rain was falling forbiddingly without. No one else could come,
and no one could wish to go. The conditions all favored a just
self-esteem, and a sense of providential preference in the accidental
assemblage of those people at that time and place.

The talk was rather naturally, though not necessarily, of books, and one
of the people was noting that children seemed to like short stories
because their minds had not the strength to keep the facts of a whole
book. The effort tired them, and they gave it up, not because a book did
not interest them, but because it exhausted their little powers. They
were good for a leap, or a dash, or a short flight in literature, even
very high literature, but they had not really the force for anything
covering greater time and space.

Another declared this very suggestive, and declared it in such a way
that the whole company perceived he had something behind his words, and
besought him to say what he meant. He did so, as well as he could, after
protesting that it was not very novel, or if so, perhaps not very
important, and if it was important, perhaps it was not true. They said
they would take the chances; and then he said that it was merely a
notion which had occurred to him at the moment concerning the new
reading of the new reading public, whether it might not be all juvenile
literature, adapted in mature terms to people of physical adolescence
but of undeveloped thinking and feeling: not really feeble-minded youth,
but aesthetically and intellectually children, who might presently grow
into the power of enjoying and digesting food for men. By-and-by they
might gather fortitude for pleasure in real literature, in fiction which
should not be a travesty of the old fairy-tales, or stories of
adventures among giants and robbers and pirates, or fables with human
beings speaking from the motives and passions of animals. He mentioned
fiction, he said, because the new reading of the new reading public
seemed to be nearly altogether fiction.

All this had so much the effect of philosophical analysis that those
comfortable people were lulled into self-approving assent; and putting
themselves altogether apart from the new reading public, they begged him
to say what he meant. He answered that there was nothing more phenomenal
in the modern American life; and he paid a pretty tribute to their
ignorance in owning that he was not surprised they knew nothing of that
public. He promised that h