Dabney's room was in full buzz when we arrived. Among the big guns present were Devon, the urbane reformer, with his warm heart, passionate sense of justice, his universal pity and fastidious taste; Speyde, the uncompromising analyst of the body and mind in revolt, and the friend of freedom; Leigh, the sentimental humorist or humorous sentimentalist of middle-class London; and Sankville, who writes provincial epics with a Dutch brush, but with the expansive view and detached tolerance of an arbiter throned on a star. These were the best known; but there were others: younger men feeling their way towards fiction, some independent, some still wondering whom it would be wisest to imitate. Twenty years ago there was no doubt, since all the manuscript babies, when at last they were born, had a way of resembling Stevenson; but to-day there are new influences. Sankville, himself, for example, is one, and a powerful one. Everyone will soon be describing provincial birthplaces with minute fidelity--and nothing else! Speyde's manner and method it is less easy to catch: he is intensely individual; he has had no predecessors and will leave no school of writers. His influence is rather upon life than upon his own craft. Devon, again, is idiosyncratic. The appeal of his work is so largely dependent upon his point of view; and points of view are the only safe thing left: imitators have to be wary in stealing them. It is when manner and matter are both straightforward that the imitators have their most profitable time. Look, for example, at _The Prisoner of Zenda_, what a progeny has that romance! Novel-writing has become a habit. Men used to write novels to amuse their fellow-creatures--to take tired people to the islands of the blest, as one of our finest living hands has put it--but to-day novel-writing has become a habit, resorted to for many different reasons. Some men write novels because they have got into a mess with a woman and want to see how it looks on paper, or to explain their real motives, or to find a way out. Other novels are really intimate letters intended for one reader only. Others--and these are largely those written by women--create the kind of life which the writer would have lived had she ever had the chance: exercises in what may be called the Consolation School of Fiction. But the greatest number are written because someone else wrote better, and the imitative faculty is so strong in us.