in his relations with the lady, and fourthly, aided by her reply to the compliment, show you how she is disposed to receive his advances――the result is that the author has done more and has done it better. I have purposely chosen a simple――almost a trivial――instance, but it is not therefore, I think, a bad example of how the use of dialogue can not merely avoid tedium, though that is a supremely desirable and indeed a vital thing in itself, but can also give a natural effect instead of an unnatural, and add to the dramatic value of a fact by showing it in actual operation, producing results, instead of merely chronicling its existence, almost as an item in a list. Novelists have realized this, and the realization of it unites with the reasons which I have already touched upon to make them try to work more and more through dialogue――more and more to make the characters speak for themselves, and less and less to speak for them except when they must. There is a gain all round――in naturalness, in drama, in conciseness, and in shapeliness. It remains, while we are on this point of the technical usefulness of dialogue, to note two or three other ways in which it serves the novelist’s turn. He finds it exceedingly to his purpose if he wishes to be impersonal, to be impartial, to keep a secret, or to hold a situation in suspense. It enables him to withdraw behind the curtain, and leave his characters alone with the reader. It enables him to get rid of the air of omniscience which narrative forces upon him, and to assume the limitations of his _dramatis personae_. By so doing he adds reality to them――they are less puppets. Speaking through A’s mouth, he sees only A’s point of view, and when he speaks through B’s mouth his knowledge of the state of events is only B’s knowledge, and no greater. He may often desire to do this, for much the same reasons as sometimes lead a writer to assume, altogether and throughout the book, the garb of one of the characters, to write in the first person, to see only what the hero sees, to know only what he knows, and to feel only what he feels. The use of dialogue is in this aspect of it a less drastic form of the same device.