"Yes, we have paid a great deal, too. Still, here at almost fifty we have rather charming homes and bank accounts, and wives that continue to put up with us; and the books are done, quite as we wanted them done. There aren't many of us, you know: not many S.O.B.'s contrive to say that much unsmashed. No: we haven't paid for doing those books the full and usual price. We have slipped by, somehow--" The other surmised pensively: "You mean, by that big Thing that doesn't approve of our getting our books done? I hadn't guessed He bothers you." After a request for deific condemnation of the third personal singular neuter pronoun, the visitor stated he meant all the Things. "They don't like us, you know. They're as vicious as the bright young men." "It _is_ droll, how They seem," the host conceded, "to lurk behind you somewhere, watching, waiting, and--that's the worst,--so able to wait. They don't have, you see, to hurry. But you have to. So, with every book, when I unwrap the advance copies, I always feel, Well, I got that one done, anyway!" "And we've slipped by Them!" "So far," the other amended. And he exhibited his fingers crossed. Whereon the visitor mentioned the infernal regions, with an outbreak of rolling, oleaginous, wholly unreticent laughter. And he said exultantly: "But I'm forty-seven! And sixteen books are done the way I god-damn wanted them done! They can begin on me, now, when They are ready." The host, however, looked disapproving. "I wish you would be a little more tactful about Them. This is my library, you know. I really, you know, would rather not have anything said here to attract Their particular attention to the place. You see, only next month I am all of forty-nine, and there are one or two other books I want to do here." Both of these aging romantics seemed quite in earnest.... § 54 They were talking, I reflected, the most incomprehensible of nonsense. A whit later, though, I believe, I understood these not unpompous and, from some aspects, not utterly underisible nor unpathetic fiction-mongers. For, as I now construe it, they talked of that formidable three with whom the artist plays and makes his troubled sport. They talked,--they also, I believe,--of common-sense and piety and death. And so to these oldsters some slight periphrases seemed called for, since, in their own romanticizing eyes (as I interpret it), they went as rebels under the fitful surveillance of powers that do not deal tenderly with rebels.