Pie is a universal taste, therefore bourgeois, like roast beef. And Bertie and I are so devoted to roast beef, and have formed almost a passion for pie! Bertie says he will lie and count the leaves on the trees before he will read another, and even Agatha says they are unsatisfactory, and that she prefers sermons--occasionally she reads one aloud to us! I never have taken kindly to this form of literature, but I really think, with all their obsolete ideas, they have more substance, more _inside_, than these lively, modern, educational, elegant, but--timid novels. I wonder if that is the word and why? I’ll ask Mr. Rogers. Two or three of the newspapers, as I told you are stately and conservative, and I notice that their review columns have the exact tone of the literature. I was told in New York that their sales were small but intensely aristocratic--so much so that a popular politician could not afford to be seen with one--and that the sensational papers had enormous circulations, and were by no means ignored by “the very best people,” that they did good by exposing the “crooked” methods of monopolists and all sorts of abuses, and that they wielded an immense political influence--also that many of the creators of the nation’s bloodless masterpieces wrote occasionally for them--for a high consideration--and were not averse from reaching the larger audience. It now comes back to me, I once heard that there is an immense sale in the United States for the sort of literature forbidden by our County Council. Yet there is no law to suppress these plague-laden rats burrowing in the cellars of the social structure. It seems to me that we are more advanced, after all. We know the world and frankly admit it. No book frightens us if it is written by a man whose gifts and whose experience fit him to write for people who demand that good taste alone shall be the line of cleavage between the real and the ideal of life, who knows that we want truth and not polite fibs, but the truths that lie in red roast beef and rich warm wine, not in some nasty mess washed down by rum--nor yet diseased livers and absinthe. From these last, indeed, we have the County Council to protect us, we have only to reject the dull and the imported thin, and to encourage frankly those who add to our knowledge of life and mature our minds. The exceptional man and woman sees, comes into contact with phases of life that the average mortal never brushes. It is, I hold, their duty to tell _all_ they know; their only lookout is to tell it for the sane not for the erotic mind. The great writers of the Past all have proved that, given the proper treatment, there is no subject yet evolved on earth that cannot be discussed. But I should say that the great Writers of the Past had never been imported to the United States. Perhaps they were carefully edited and put into drawers first.