"Let me have just one other book to live and talk in," Charteris said, "and I will explain the scope and aim of novel writing with such a grace and loveliness as never was! My notions have a freer wing than yours: and if you are obstinate about this, you will be encountering by and by that statement in the public prints. 'The author has here vainly endeavored to recapture the charm of his earlier _Beyond Life_, and when he speaks in his own person is by no means so amusing.' That, I forewarn you, will be the unanimous verdict." "I do not altogether aim at being amusing. I want, rather, to wind up affairs by contriving an epilogue for the Biography." He regarded me for some while: and I do not know how to indicate his kindly and rather commiserating pensiveness. Presently he said: "But I forewarn you, too, that nobody is ever going to recognise the Biography as an actual fact. You may pretend to yourself, if you like, that all your writing is of this one human life reincarnated over and over again, in the flesh of Manuel's various descendants, and endlessly performing the same rôle in what is, at bottom, always the same comedy. The nearest anyone will ever come to agreement with you is to admit that you have wasted time and pains in patching up a sort of genealogy; and that your books, in fact, are--if you think it a merit,--rather monotonously the same, because you are unable to draw any figure other than yourself in a more or less transparent masquerade." "The charge of monotony--in that word's primal sense, which you might with profit look up in the dictionary,--I acknowledge, and even glory in. For, as you say, it is perhaps the main point of the Biography that it--and human life--present for all practical purposes the same comedy over and over again with each new generation." "Ecclesiastes, I believe, commented on the same phenomenon. Still, if you want people to read more than one of your books--" "Not my books," I amended, "but my one book, which is the Biography, and of which my various publications are chapters." Charteris shrugged. "My dear fellow! I, in common with the remainder of mankind, refuse to admit the possibility of anybody's writing a book in nineteen volumes. It simply is not done." "But," he was told, with stubborn modesty, "but I have done it. Anyhow, fifteen volumes--" "Oh, no: you have merely written fifteen books. That is a quite different affair, which anyone could manage, given pen and ink and time and a sufficient lack of consideration for one's fellows. The connection of these various books, I can assure you, is either forced or imagined: otherwise, they would be an affront to the rest of us." "Of course," I conceded, a bit mollified, "of course, if you are putting the Biography upon a basis with Sir Thomas Browne's Relations Whose Truth We Fear--" "I am putting, to the contrary, the author of the Biography," said Charteris, "into a phrase." "And that phrase is--?"