“After a little desultory conversation, Mrs. Sincue’s visitor, dropping his dark eyes to the ground, uttered in a voice that betrayed neither exultation nor grief, ‘Poor old Hapgood’s cut it with Nanette. Don’t you remember Nanette, who wore an apron with lace all round it and those pocket things, and curled hair?’” This latter rendering, I suppose, is more vague in places, and in other places more accentuated, but I don’t see how it is more impressionist. It is perfectly true you complain of me that I have not made it plain with whom Mr. Robert Grimshaw was really in love, or that when he resigned himself to the clutches of Katya Lascarides, whom personally I extremely dislike, an amiable but meddlesome and inwardly conceited fool was, pathetically or even tragically, reaping the harvest of his folly. I omitted to add these comments, because I think that for a writer to intrude himself between his characters and his reader is to destroy to that extent all the illusion of his work. But when I found that yourself and all the moderately quick-minded, moderately sane persons who had read the book in its original form failed entirely to appreciate what to me has appeared as plain as a pikestaff--namely, that Mr. Grimshaw was extremely in love with Pauline Leicester, and that, in the first place, by marrying her to Dudley Leicester, and, in the second place, by succumbing to a disagreeable personality, he was committing the final folly of this particular affair--when I realized that these things were not plain, I hastened to add those passages of explicit conversation, those droppings of the eyelids and tragic motions of the hands, that you have since been good enough to say have made the book. Heaven knows, one tries enormously hard to be simple, to be even transparently simple, but one falls so lamentably between two stools. Thus, another reader, whom I had believed to be a person of some intellect, has insisted to me that in calling this story “A Call” I must have had in my mind something mysterious, something mystical; but what I meant was that Mr. Robert Grimshaw, putting the ear-piece to his ear and the mouthpiece to his mouth, exclaimed, after the decent interval that so late at night the gentleman in charge of the exchange needs for awaking from slumber and grunting something intelligible--Mr. Grimshaw exclaimed, “Give me 4259 Mayfair.” This might mean that Lady Hudson was a subscriber to the Post Office telephone system, but it does not mean in the least that Mr. Grimshaw felt religious stirrings within him or “A Call” to do something heroic and chivalrous, such as aiding women to obtain the vote.