As you have seen, I am hard at work at my new novel. The leisure of a novelist is so scanty that I know you’ll forgive my writing only a line. I am in no way associated with James Orlebar Cloyster, nor do I wish to be. Rather I would forget his very existence. You are aware of the interests which I have at heart: social reform, the education of the submerged, the physical needs of the young—there is no necessity for me to enumerate my ideals further. To get quick returns from philanthropy, to put remedial organisation into speedy working order wants capital. Cloyster’s system was one way of obtaining some of it, but when that failed I had to look out for another. I’m glad I helped in the system, for it made me realise how large an income a novelist can obtain. I’m glad it failed because its failure suggested that I should try to get for myself those vast sums which I had been getting for the selfish purse of an already wealthy man. Unconsciously, he has played into my hands. I read his books before I signed them, and I find that I have thoroughly absorbed those tricks of his, of style and construction, which opened the public’s coffers to him. _The Browns of Brixton_ will eclipse anything that Cloyster has previously done, for this reason, that it will out-Cloyster Cloyster. It is Cloyster with improvements. In thus abducting his novel-reading public I shall feel no compunction. His serious verse and his society dialogues bring him in so much that he cannot be in danger of financial embarrassment. _Yours sincerely, John Hatton_. Now this letter set my brain buzzing like the engine of a stationary Vanguard. I, too, had been in the habit of reading Mr. Cloyster’s dialogues before I signed and sent them off. I had often thought to myself, also, that they couldn’t take much writing, that it was all a knack; and the more I read of them the more transparent the knack appeared to me to be. Just for a lark, I sat down that very evening and had a go at one. Taking the Park for my scene, I made two or three theatrical celebrities whose names I had seen in the newspapers talk about a horse race. At least, one talked about a horse race, and the others thought she was gassing about a new musical comedy, the name of the play being the same as the name of the horse, “The Oriental Belle.” A very amusing muddle, with lots of _doubles entendres_, and heaps of adverbial explanation in small print. Such as: Miss Adeline Genie (with the faint, incipient blush which Mrs. Adair uses to test her Rouge Imperial). That sort of thing.