the other thing.
I'm sure if they offered me the chance, I could make myself attractive
to their readers, and I believe I should have the charm of novelty."

"You would have more than the charm of novelty," the hero said, and the
witness trembled again for the _convenances_ which one so often sees
offended on the benches in the Park. But then he remembered that these
young people were avowedly nice, and that they were morally incapable of
misbehavior. "And for a time, at least, I believe you--I believe _we_,
for I must necessarily be engaged with you--would succeed. The
difficulty would be to get the notion of our employment to the authors."
It was on the listener's tongue to say that he thought he could manage
that, when the hero arrested him with the sad misgiving, "But they would
say we were commonplace, and that would kill the chance of our ever
having a run."

A tremendous longing filled the witness, a potent desire to rescue this
engaging pair from the dismay into which they fell at the fatal word.
"No, no!" he conjured them. "_Not_ commonplace. A judicious paragraph
anticipative of your reappearance could be arranged, in which you could
be hailed as the _normal_ hero and heroine, and greeted as a grateful
relief from the hackneyed freaks and deformities of the prevalent short
story, or the impassioned paper-doll pattern of the mediaeval men and
maidens, or the spotted and battered figures of the studies in morbid
analysis which pass for fiction in the magazines. We must get that
luminous word _normal_ before the reading public at once, and you will
be rightly seen in its benign ray and recognized from the start--yes! in
_advance_ of the start--for what you are: types of the loveliness of
our average life, the fairest blossoms of that faith in human nature
which has flourished here into the most beautiful and glorious
civilization of all times. With us the average life is enchanting, the
normal is the exquisite. Have patience, have courage; your time is
coming again!"

It seemed to him that the gentle shapes wavered in his vehement breath,
and he could not realize that in their alien realm they could not have
heard a word he uttered. They remained dreamily silent, as if he had not
spoken, and then the heroine said: "Perhaps we shall have to wait for a
new school of short-story writers before we can get back into the
magazines. Some beginner _must_ see in us what has always pleased: the
likeness to himself or he