"No, but it's a proper way of beginning. Like Family Prayers." "I suppose," said Wilkins, "if you told a man of that sort that there were more and better poets writing in English beautifully in 1914 than ever before he wouldn't believe it. I suppose if you said that Ford Madox Hueffer, for example, had produced sweeter and deeper poetry than Alfred, Lord Tennyson, he'd have a fit." "He'd have nothing of the kind. You could no more get such an idea into the head of one of these great vestiges of our Gladstonian days than you could get it into the seat of a Windsor chair.... And people don't have fits unless something has got into them.... No, he'd reflect quite calmly that first of all he'd never heard of this Hueffer, then that probably he was a very young man. And, anyhow, one didn't meet him in important places.... And after inquiry he would find out he was a journalist.... And then probably he'd cease to cerebrate upon the question...." § 3 "Besides," said Boon, "we must have one of our literary peers because of America." "You're unjust to America," I said. "No," said Boon. "But Aunt Dove--I know her ways." That led to a long, rambling discussion about the American literary atmosphere. Nothing that I could say would make him relent from his emphatic assertion that it is a spinster atmosphere, an atmosphere in which you can't say all sorts of things and where all sorts of things have to be specially phrased. "And she can't stand young things and crude things----" "America!" said Wilkins. "The America I mean. The sort of America that ought to supply young new writers with caresses and--nourishment. ...Instead of which you get the _Nation_.... That bleak acidity, that refined appeal to take the child away." "But they don't produce new young writers!" said Wilkins. "But they do!" said Boon. "And they strangle them!" It was extraordinary what a power metaphors and fancies had upon Boon. Only those who knew him intimately can understand how necessary Miss Bathwick was to him. He would touch a metaphor and then return and sip it, and then sip and drink and swill until it had intoxicated him hopelessly.