forgot to ask him whether he knew his beautiful compatriot
or not; but she took it for granted that they had met, if not at
home, at least in London, as they had both been made so much of, and
at the same houses.

The dinner was well on its way towards its end, and the women had
begun to talk across the table, and to exchange bankers' addresses,
and to say "Be sure and look us up in Paris," and "When do you expect
to sail from Cowes?" They were enlivened and interested, and the
present odors of the food and flowers and wine, and the sense of
leisure before them, made it seem almost a pity that such a
well-suited gathering should have to separate for even a summer's
pleasure.

The Austrian Minister was saying this to his hostess, when Sir Henry
Kent, who had been talking across to Phillips, the novelist, leaned
back in his place and said, as though to challenge the attention of
every one, "I can't agree with you, Phillips. I am sure no one else
will."

"Dear me," complained Mrs. Trevelyan, plaintively, "what have you been
saying now, Mr. Phillips? He always has such debatable theories," she
explained.

"On the contrary, Mrs. Trevelyan," answered the novelist, "it is the
other way. It is Sir Henry who is making all the trouble. He is
attacking one of the oldest and dearest platitudes I know." He paused
for the general to speak, but the older man nodded his head for him to
go on. "He has just said that fiction is stranger than truth,"
continued the novelist. "He says that I--that people who write could
never interest people who read if they wrote of things as they really
are. They select, he says--they take the critical moment in a man's
life and the crises, and want others to believe that that is what
happens every day. Which it is not, so the general says. He thinks
that life is commonplace and uneventful--that is, uneventful in a
picturesque or dramatic way. He admits that women's lives are saved
from drowning, but that they are not saved by their lovers, but by a
longshoreman with a wife and six children, who accepts five pounds for
doing it. That's it, is it not?" he asked.

The general nodded and smiled. "What I said to Phillips was," he
explained, "that if things were related just as they happen, they
would not be interesting. People do not say the dramatic things they
say on the stage or in novels; in real life they are commonplace or
sordid--or disappointing. I have seen men die on the battle-field,
for in