"Well, you ought to say even the simplest things in a distinguished way; and here, all through, I find you saying the most distinguished things in the simplest way. But I won't worry you about things that are not vital. I'll allow, for the sake of argument, that you can't have virility if you remember that you are a gentleman even when you are writing fiction. But you _can_ have _passion_. Why don't you?" "Don't I? I thought--" "Not a speck of it--not a single speck! It's rather a delicate point, and I don't exactly know how to put it, but, if you want me to be frank, I must." She looked at her great-uncle, and he nodded encouragement. "I don't believe there's a single place where he crushes her to his heart, or presses his lips to hers in a long kiss. He kisses her cheek once, but I don't call that anything. Why, in lots of the books, nowadays, the girls themselves cling to the men in a close embrace, or put their mouths tenderly to theirs--Well, of course, it sounds rather disgusting, but in your own earlier books, I'm sure there's more of it--of passion. Isn't there? Think!" The Veteran Novelist tried to think. "To tell you the truth, my dear, I can't remember. I hope there was, and there always will be, love, and true love, in my novels--the kind that sometimes ends in happy marriage, but is always rather shy of showing itself off to the reader in caresses of any kind. I think passion can be intimated, and is better so than brutally stated. If you have a lot of hugging and kissing--" "Uncle!" "--How are your lovers different from those poor things in the Park that make you ashamed as you pass them?" "The police ought to put a stop to it. They are perfectly disgraceful!" "And they ought to put a stop to it in the novels. It's not only indecent, but it's highly insanitary. Nice people don't want you to kiss their children, nowadays, and yet they expect us novelists to supply them with passion of the most demonstrative sort in our fiction. Among the Japanese, who are now one of the great world-powers, kissing is quite unknown in real life. I don't know the Japanese fiction very well, but I doubt whether there's a single kiss, or double, in it. I believe that a novel full of intense passion could be written without the help of one embrace from beginning to end." "Uncle!" the girl vividly exclaimed, "why don't you _do_ it? It would be the greatest success! Just give them the wink, somehow, at the start--just hint that there was the greatest kind of passion going on all the time and never once showing itself, and the girls would be raving about it. Why _don't_ you do it, uncle? You know I do so want you, for once, to write the most popular book of the month!" "I want to do it myself, my dear. But as to my writing a book full of suppressed passion, that's a story in itself." "Tell it!" she entreated.