It was plain enough that Peck did not value Crane very highly, and Crane certainly treated Peck very coolly. Miss Moyne, however, was blissfully unaware that she was the cause of this trouble, and for that matter the men themselves would have denied with indignant fervor any thing of the kind. Both of them were stalwart and rather handsome, the Kentuckian dark and passionate looking, the New Yorker fair, cool and willful in appearance. Miss Moyne had been pleased with them both, without a special thought of either, whilst they were going rapidly into the worry and rapture of love, with no care for anybody but her. She was beautiful and good, sweet-voiced, gentle, more inclined to listen than to talk, and so she captivated everybody from the first. "I think it would be quite interesting," she said, "if it should turn out that Mr. Dufour is a genuine foreign author, like Tolstoï or Daudet or----" "Realists, and nobody but realists," interposed Mrs. Philpot; "why don't you say Zola, and have done with it?" "Well, Zola, then, if it must be," Miss Moyne responded; "for, barring my American breeding and my Southern conservatism, I am nearly in sympathy with--no, not that exactly, but we are so timid. I should like to feel a change in the literary air." "Oh, you talk just as Arthur Selby writes in his critical papers. He's all the time trying to prove that fiction is truth and that truth is fiction. He lauds Zola's and Dostoieffsky's filthy novels to the skies; but in his own novels he's as prudish and Puritanish as if he had been born on Plymouth Rock instead of on an Illinois prairie." "I wonder why he is not a guest here," some one remarked. "I should have thought that our landlord would have had _him_ at all hazards. Just now Selby is monopolizing the field of American fiction. In fact I think he claims the earth." "It is so easy to assume," said Guilford Ferris, whose romances always commanded eulogy from the press, but invariably fell dead on the market; "but I am told that Selby makes almost nothing from the sales of his books." "But the magazines pay him handsomely," said Miss Moyne. "Yes, they do," replied Ferris, pulling his long brown mustache reflectively, "and I can't see why. He really is not popular; there is no enthusiasm for his fiction." "It's a mere vogue, begotten by the critics," said Hartley Crane. "Criticism is at a very low ebb in America. Our critics are all either ignorant or given over to putting on English and French airs." Ferris opened his eyes in a quiet way and glanced at Peck who, however, did not appear to notice the remark. "There's a set of them in Boston and New York," Crane went on, "who watch the _Revue de Deux Mondes_ and the London _Atheneum_, ready to take the cue from them. Even American books must stand or fall by the turn of the foreign thumb." "That is a very ancient grumble," said Ferris, in a tone indicative of impartial indifference.