But that is not the great way. The great way, from Virgil’s to Browning’s, is the way of pregnant brevity. And where dialogue _is_ employed in the finer short story, every line of it is bound to be significant. The short story has no room for the reply that is only _near_ to being appropriate, and it deserves no pardon for the word that would not have been certainly employed. It is believed, generally, and one can well suppose that it is true, that the average dialogue of the diffuse novel is written quickly. That is in part because so little of it is really dramatic--is really at all the inevitable word. But the limited sentences in which, when the narrator must narrate no more, the persons who have been described in the short story express themselves on their restricted stage, need, if I dare assert it, to be written slowly, or, what is better, re-read a score of times, and pruned, and looked at from without, and surveyed on every side. But, indeed, of the long story, as well as of the short, may it not be agreed that on the whole the dialogue is apt to be the least successful thing? The ordinary reader, of course, will not be dramatic enough to notice its deficiencies. In humorous dialogue, these are seen least. Humorous dialogue has a legitimate licence. You do not ask from it exactitude; you do not nail it down to its statement. But in the dialogue of the critical moment, when the fire of a little word will kindle how great a matter, how needful then, and how rare, that the word be the true one! We do not want laxity, inappropriateness, on the one hand; nor, on the other, the tortured phraseology of a too resolute cleverness. And those of us who have a preference--derived, it may be, from the simpler generation of Dickens--for an unbending when it is a question of _little_ matters, and, when it is a question of great ones, for ‘a sincere large accent, nobly plain’--well! there is much of modern finessing we are hardly privileged to understand. Yet if one wants an instance, in a long novel, in which the sentence now said at a white heat is the result, inevitable, burningly true to life, of the sentence that was said just before, one condones the obscurity that has had its imitators, and pays one’s tribute of admiration to the insight of _Diana of the Crossways_. One of the difficulties of the short story, the short story shares with the acted drama, and that is the indispensableness of compression--the need that every sentence shall tell--the difference being, that in the acted drama it must tell for the moment, it must tell till it is found out, and in the short story it must tell for at least a _modest_ eternity, and something more, if that be possible--for if a ‘Fortnight is eternity’ upon the Stock Exchange, a literary eternity is, perhaps, forty years.