Summer on Mt. Boab was much like summer on any other mountain, and life at Hotel Helicon was very like life at any other mountain hotel, save that a certain specialization due to the influence of literature and art was apparent in the present instance, giving to the house, the landscape and the of the guests a , so to say, of self-consciousness and artificiality. Not that these authors, thus together by the grace of a man grown suddenly rich, were very different from men and[75] women of other lines in life, the real sprang out of the obligation by which every one felt bound to make the most, in a professional way, of the situation and the environment. Perhaps there was not a soul under the broad roof of Hotel Helicon, servants excepted, that did not in its substance the material for a novel, a poem, or an essay which was to brim with the local life and flash with the local color of the region of Mt. Boab. Yes, there appeared to be one exception. Dufour constantly expressed a contempt for the mountaineers and their country.  
“To be sure,” he conceded, “to be sure there is a demand for dialect stories, and I suppose that they must be written; but for my part I cannot see why we Americans must ourselves in the eyes of all the world by flooding our magazines, newspapers and books with yawp instead of with a truly characteristic American literature of a high order. There is some excuse for a quasi-negro literature, and even the Creoles might have a set apart for them, but dialect, on the whole, is growing to be a literary bore.”
 
“But don’t you think,” said Miss Crabb, drawing her chin under, and projecting her upper teeth to such a degree that anything like realistic description would appear , “don’t you think, Mr. Dufour, that Mr. Tolliver would make a great character in a mountain romance?”
 
“No. There is nothing great in a clown, as[76] such,” he answered. “If Tolliver is great he would be great without his .”
 
“Yes,” she admitted, “but the , the color, the contrast, you know, would be gone. Now Craddock—”
 
“Craddock is excellent, so long as there is but one Craddock, but when there are some dozens of him it is different,” said Dufour, “and it is the process of that I object to. There’s Cable, who is no longer a genius of one species. The writers of Creole stories are by the score, and, poor old Uncle Remus! everybody writes negro dialect now. Literary claim-jumpers are conscienceless. The book market will soon be utterly ruined.”
 
Miss Crabb out her lean sallow cheeks and sighed heavily.
 
“I had hoped,” she said, “to get my novel on the market before this, but I have not yet found a publisher to suit me.”
 
She inwardly at this way of expressing the fact that every publisher, high and low, far and near, had declined her MS. out of hand; but she could not say the awful truth in its simpliest terms, while speaking to one so prosperous as Dufour. She felt that she must at all hazards preserve a reasonable show of literary independence. Crane came to her aid.
 
“One publisher is just as good as another,” he said almost . “They are all thieves. They report every book a failure, save those they own , and yet they all get rich. I shall publish for myself my next volume.”
 
 
Dufour smiled grimly and turned away. It was rather , this iteration and of so grave a charge against the moral character of publishers, and this threat of Crane’s to become his own publisher was a bit of unconscious and therefore humor.
 
“It’s too pathetic to be laughed at,” Dufour thought, as he strolled along to where Miss Moyne sat under a tree, “but that Kentuckian actually thinks himself a poet!”
 
With all his good nature and kind heartedness, Dufour could be prejudiced, and he drew the line at what he called the “prevailing tendency toward boastful among Kentucky gentlemen.”
 
As he walked away he heard Crane saying:
 
“George Dunkirk & Co. have stolen at least twenty thousand dollars in from me during the past three years.”
 
It was the voice of Ferris that made interrogative response:
 
“Is Dunkirk your publisher?”
 
“Yes, or rather my robber.”
 
“Glad of it, loves company.”
 
Dufour half turned about and cast a quick glance at the speakers. He did not say anything, however, but resumed his progress toward Miss Moyne, who had just been joined by Mrs. Nancy Jones Black, a and oldish woman very famous on account of having assumed much and done little. Mrs. Nancy Jones Black was from Boston. She was president of the Woman’s Antiquarian Club, of the Ladies’ Greek[78] Association, of The Sappho Club, of the Newport Fashionable Near-sighted Club for the study of Esoteric Transcendentalism, and it may ............