s front, adorned with
snow-white scrolls; the grand Wagnerian din of clanking cups and
bowls, the flashing staccato of brandishing cutlery, the piercing
recitative of the white-aproned grub-maidens at the morgue-like
banquet tables; the recurrent lied-motif of the cash-register--it
was a gigantic, triumphant welding of art and sound, a deafening,
soul-uplifting pageant of heroic and emblematic life. And the beans
were only ten cents. We wondered why our fellow-artists cared to dine
at sad little tables in their so-called Bohemian restaurants; and
we shuddered lest they should seek out our resorts and make them
conspicuous with their presence.

Pettit wrote many stories, which the editors returned to him. He
wrote love stories, a thing I have always kept free from, holding the
belief that the well-known and popular sentiment is not properly a
matter for publication, but something to be privately handled by the
alienists and florists. But the editors had told him that they wanted
love stories, because they said the women read them.

Now, the editors are wrong about that, of course. Women do not read
the love stories in the magazines. They read the poker-game stories
and the recipes for cucumber lotion. The love stories are read by fat
cigar drummers and little ten-year-old girls. I am not criticising
the judgment of editors. They are mostly very fine men, but a man
can be but one man, with individual opinions and tastes. I knew two
associate editors of a magazine who were wonderfully alike in almost
everything. And yet one of them was very fond of Flaubert, while the
other preferred gin.

Pettit brought me his returned manuscripts, and we looked them over
together to find out why they were not accepted. They seemed to me
pretty fair stories, written in a good style, and ended, as they
should, at the bottom of the last page.

They were well constructed and the events were marshalled in orderly
and logical sequence. But I thought I detected a lack of living
substance--it was much as if I gazed at a symmetrical array of
presentable clamshells from which the succulent and vital inhabitants
had been removed. I intimated that the author might do well to get
better acquainted with his theme.

"You sold a story last week," said Pettit, "about a gun fight in an
Arizona mining town in which the hero drew his Colt's .45 and shot
seven bandits as fast as they came in the door. Now, if a six-shooter
could--"

"Oh, well," said