A NIECE\'S LITERARY ADVICE TO HER UNCLE

A Veteran Novelist, who was also an intimate friend of the Easy Chair\'s, sat before his desk pensively supporting his cheek in his left hand while his right toyed with the pen from which, for the moment at least, fiction refused to flow. His great-niece, who seemed such a contradiction in terms, being as little and vivid personally as she was nominally large and stately, opened the door and advanced upon him.

"Do I disturb you, uncle?" she asked; she did not call him great-uncle, because that, she rightly said, was ridiculous; and now, as part of the informality, she went on without waiting for him to answer, "Because, you know, you wanted me to tell you what I thought of your last story; and I\'ve just read it."

"Oh yes!" the Veteran Novelist assented brightly, hiding his struggle to recall which story it was. "Well?"

"Well," she said, firmly but kindly, "you want me to be frank with you, don\'t you?"

"By all means, my dear. It\'s very good of you to read my story." By this time, he had, with the help of the rather lean volume into which his publishers had expanded a long-short story, and which she now held intensely clasped to her breast, really remembered.

"Not at all!" she said. She sat down very elastically in the chair on the other side of his desk, and as she talked she accented each of her emotions by a spring from the cushioned seat. "In the first place," she said, with the effect of coming directly to business, "I suppose you know yourself that it couldn\'t be called virile."

"No?" he returned. "What is virile?"

"Well, I can\'t explain, precisely; but it\'s something that all the critics say of a book that is very strong, don\'t you know; and masterful; and relentless; and makes you feel as if somebody had taken you by the throat; and shakes you up awfully; and seems to throw you into the air, and trample you under foot."

"Good heavens, my dear!" the Veteran Novelist exclaimed. "I hope I\'m a gentleman, even when I\'m writing a novel."

"Your being a gentleman has nothing to do with it, uncle!" she said, severely, for she thought she perceived a disposition in the Veteran Novelist to shuffle. "You can\'t be virile and at the same time remember that you are a gentleman. Lots of women write virile books."

"Ladies?" the novelist asked.

"Don\'t I say that has nothing to do with it? If you wish to grip the reader\'s attention you must let yourself go, whether you\'re a gentleman or a lady. Of course," she relented, "your book\'s very idyllic, and delightful, and all that; but," she resumed, severely, "do you think an honest critic could say there was not a dull page in it from cover to cover?"

The novelist sighed. "I\'m sure I don\'t know. They seem to say it—in the passages quoted in the advertisements—of all the books published. Except mine," he added, sadly.

"Well, we will pass that point," his great-niece relented again. "I didn\'t intend to wound your feelings, uncle."

"Oh, you haven\'t. I suppose I am a little too easy-going at times."

"Yes, that is it. One can\'t say dull; but too easy-going. No faithful critic could begin a notice of your book with such a passage as: \'Have you read it? No? Then hop, skip, and jump, and get it. Don\'t wait to find your hat or drink your coffee. March! It\'s going like the wind, and you must kite if you want one of the first edition of fifty thousand!\' Now that," his great-niece ended, fondly, "is what I should like every critic to say of your book, uncle."

The Veteran Novelist reflected for a moment. Then he said, more spiritedly, "I don\'t believe I should, my dear."

"Then you must; that\'s all. But that\'s a small thing. What I really wonder at is that, with all your experience, you are not more of a stylist."

"Stylist?"

"Yes. I don\'t believe there\'s an epigram in your book from beginning to end. That\'s the reason the critics don\'t quote any brilliant sentences from it, and the publishers can\'t advertise it properly. It makes me mad to find the girls repeating other authors\' sayings, and I never catch a word from a book of yours, though you\'ve been writing more than a century."

"Not quite so long, my dear, I think; though very, very long. But just what do you mean by style?"

"Well, you ought to say even the simplest things in a distinguished way; and here, all through, I find you saying the most distinguished things in the simplest way. But I won\'t worry you about things that are not vital. I\'ll allow, for the sake of argument, that you can\'t have virility if you remember that you are a gentleman even when you are writing fiction. But you can have passion. Why don\'t you?"

"Don\'t I? I thought—"

"Not a speck of it—not a single speck! It\'s rather a delicate point, and I don\'t exactly know how to put it, but, if you want me to be frank, I must." She looked at her great-uncle, and he nodded encouragement. "I don\'t believe there\'s a single place where he crushes her to his heart, or presses his lips to hers in a long kiss. He kisses her cheek once, but I don\'t call that anything. Why, in lots of the books, nowadays, the girls themselves cling to the men in a close embrace, or put their mouths tenderly to theirs—Well, of course, it sounds rather disgusting, but in your own earlier books, I\'m sure there\'s more of it—of passion. Isn\'t there? Think!"

The Veteran Novelist tried to think. "To tell you the truth, my dear, I can\'t remember. I hope there was, and there always will be, love, and true love, in my novels—the kind that sometimes ends in happy marriage, but is always rather shy of showing itself off to the reader in caresses of any kind. I think passion can be intimated, and is better so than brutally stated. If you have a lot of hugging and kissing—"

"Uncle!"

"—How are your lovers different from those poor things in the Park that make you ashamed as you pass them?"

"The police ought to put a stop to it. They are perfectly disgraceful!"

"And they ought to put a stop to it in the novels. It\'s not only indec............