"I quite agree," said Sankville. "A novelist's duty is to do his work within the limits imposed upon him. The English don't like certain things blurted out in their stories. Very well, then, the English novelist had got to say these things between the lines. Thackeray, who was about equally interested in cause and effect, did it most admirably; Meredith, who was rather more interested in cause than effect, did it better; Dickens, who was interested only in effect, left it alone. Nowadays there is a kind of competition among novelists as to which shall be boldest." "Yes," said Dabney, "but the bore of it is, to those of us who know anything of life, that their boldness is such childish business. There is only one thing that they want to say, and we know exactly what it is. When Speyde talks about full lengths that's all he means. Nothing else. You would all save lots of time--if you will allow a mere journalist and frivolous novel-reader to make a suggestion--if you put at the beginning of your books a warning to the effect that the hero, heroine, and villain who are to be met in the pages that follow are human beings with the ordinary emotions. That, after all, is the only thing you want us to understand." "Reverting to that matter of saying the more critically emotional or physical thing between the lines," said the quiet voice of Devon, "it might be laid down as an axiom--might it not?--that the success of a novelist in thus conveying these impressions without printing them is largely the proof of his excellence? It seems to me that the photographic reproduction of life which Speyde asks for requires totally different gifts from those of the novelist. Something of the statistician; much of the morbid anatomist." "There's another thing," said Dabney, "that makes this realistic stuff a mistake, and that is that the English don't want the truth about anything. They never tell it and don't want it told to them. An appearance of truth--the ghost of truth--is all you need offer them." But Speyde wouldn't have it. "No," he said. "English fiction has got to be freed, and the only way to do it is for the novelist to tell the whole truth, extenuating and suppressing nothing." "Granting that for a moment," said Leigh, "it does not even then follow--with all the libraries clamouring for this kind of minute revelation--that the novel will come; because before there can be a novel there must be a novelist, and the novelist required here is one of stupendous genius."