Then you'll understand." And backing away he called to the coachman: "Drive on!" ignoring his brother-in-law, who sat huddled in a corner, glassy eyes focused on him.
* * * * * Portlaw almost capered with surprise and relief when at breakfast he learned that the Tressilvains had departed.
"Oh, everything is coming everybody's way," said Malcourt gaily--"like the last chapter of a bally novel--the old-fashioned kind, Billy, where Nemesis gets busy with a gun and kind Providence hitches 'em up in ever-after blocks of two.

It takes a rotten novelist to use a gun on his villains! It's never done in decent literature--never done anywhere except in real life." He swallowed his coffee and, lighting a cigarette, tipped back his chair, balancing himself with one hand on the table.
"The use of the gun," he said lazily, "is obsolete in the modern novel; the theme now is, how to be passionate though pure.

Personally, being neither one nor the other, I remain uninterested in the modern novel." "Real life," said Portlaw, spearing a fish-ball, "is damn monotonous.
The only gun-play is in the morning papers." "Sure," nodded Malcourt, "and there's too many shooting items in 'em every day to make gun-play available for a novel....

Once, when I thought I could write--just after I left college--they took me aboard a morning newspaper on the strength of a chance I had to discover a missing woman.
"She was in hiding; her name had been horribly spattered in a divorce, and the poor thing was in hiding--had changed her name, crept off to a little town in Delaware.
"Our enlightened press was hunting for her; to find her was termed a 'scoop,' I believe....

Well--boys pull legs off grasshoppers and do other damnable things without thinking....