In chapter five Basil and Ursula meet again; this time at a picnic. The sub-editor does not wish to repeat himself, otherwise he possibly would have summed up chapter five by saying it was “taken up with the humours of the usual picnic.” In chapter six something happens: “Basil, returning home in the twilight, comes across Ursula Bart, in a lonely point of the moor, talking earnestly to a rough-looking stranger. His approach over the soft turf being unnoticed, he cannot help overhearing Ursula’s parting words to the forbidding-looking stranger: ‘I must see you again! To-morrow night at half-past nine! In the gateway of the ruined abbey!’ Who is he? And why must Ursula see him again at such an hour, in such a spot?” So here, at cost of reading twenty lines, I am landed, so to speak, at the beginning of the seventh chapter. Why don’t I set to work to read it? The sub-editor has spoiled me. “You read it,” I want to say to him. “Tell me to-morrow morning what it is all about. Who was this bounder? Why should Ursula want to see him again? Why choose a draughty place? Why half-past nine o’clock at night, which must have been an awkward time for both of them—likely to lead to talk? Why should I wade though this seventh chapter of three columns and a half? It’s your work. What are you paid for?” My fear is lest this sort of thing shall lead to a demand on the part of the public for condensed novels. What busy man is going to spend a week of evenings reading a book when a nice kind sub-editor is prepared in five minutes to tell him what it is all about! Then there will come a day—I feel it—when the business-like Editor will say to himself: “What in thunder is the sense of my paying one man to write a story of sixty thousand words and another man to read it and tell it again in sixteen hundred!”