"_I see my audience is in touch with me. It works both ways._" (What works both ways? I must have left something out.) "_A Duchess of my acquaintance said some poignant, pregnant words--as indeed all her words are pregnant and poignant_" (he bowed to an old corpulent lady in another part of the room)--"_to me the other day. She said that her novel of predilection was not a society novel. 'I know it all, don't I, like the palm of my hand?' she objected. 'I know how to behave in a drawing-room and how not to behave in a boudoir!' So she complained. The substance of her complaint, as I understand it, is this;--what she wants is worlds not realized! She wants to see the actress in her drawing-room, the flower-girl in her garret, the laundress at her tub, the burglar at his work_----" Here George made a little bob at Mr. Aix in the audience, for there he was, and there was another fit of clapping. Then he went on-- "_I mean to say that what we mostly seek in fiction is to be taken out of our own lives, and put into somebody else's--to temporarily change our moral environment. High life is deeply interested in what is going on below stairs. Bill Sykes and 'Liza of Lambeth, if they have any time for reading, want to know all about countesses and their attendant sprites._" (Fancy calling Simon Hermyre that!) "_The Highest or the Lowest, but no middle course, is the novelist's counsel of perfection. There is no second class in the literary railway._ "_Yet there is a serious issue involved in this proposition. If, for instance--only for instance, for I am very sure that most of us here will have to rely on imagination, not fact, to support my illustration--if our home is a suburban one, and our wildest actual dissipation a tea-party in Clapham or Tooting--even Clapham Rise or Upper Tooting--we must transport ourselves in seven-league boots to the better quarters of London, to visualize the giddy cultured throng in the halls of Belgravia, and set down accurately the facile inaccuracies of the small talk of Mayfair. It is the tale of the mad, bad great world that sets the heart of the matron of Kennington Common aflame, and makes her waking dreams 'all a wonder and a wild desire.' Que voulez vous? She is our staple standing reader. She does not want to bend her chaste thoughts towards Hornsey Rise and Cricklewood, to envisage, stimulated by the novelist's art, its bursten boilers, its infant woes, its humdrum marrying and giving in marriage. No, she prefers, in her grey unlovely Jerry-built parlour, to gloat over the morbid, rose-coloured sins that are enacted in the halls of fashion; the voluptuous sorrows of the Bridge-end of the week; the mystery of Royal visits postponed are her chosen pabulum. To all these novelists whose ways are cast in safe and humdrum middle-class places I would say that they had best ignore their entourage as a help to local colour. In this case, character drawing, like charity, should not begin at Home.