But Tilly dreads disappointment as she dreads disease. To her disappointment is a disease in the character of the person who inflicts the disappointment. Once I tried to get you to read one of Balzac's masterpieces, _The Magic Skin_. I told you enough about it to enable you to understand what I now say: that ever since I became engaged to Tilly I have been to her as a magic skin which, as she cautiously watches it, has always shrunk a little whenever I have encountered a defeat or brought her a disappointment. No later success, on the contrary, ever re-expands the shrunken skin: it remains shrunken where each latest disappointment has left it. Now when I tell her of my downfall and the collapse of the gorgeous summer plans! BEVERLEY (the Expanding Scamp and the Shrinking Skin). BEN DOOLITTLE TO BEVERLEY SANDS _May 14th._ DEAR BEVERLEY: I have duly pondered the letters you send. "Fie, fee, fo, fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman!" If you do not mind, I shall keep these documents from him in my possession. And suppose you send me all later letters, whether from him or from anyone else, that bear on this matter. It begins to grow interesting and I believe it will bear watching. Make me, then, as your lawyer, the custodian of all pertinent and impertinent papers. They can go into the locker where I keep your immortal but impecunious Will. Some day I might have to appear in court, I with my shovel and five senses and no imagination, to plead _une cause célèbre_ (a little more of my scant intimate French). The explanation I give of this gratuitously insulting letter is that at last you have run into a hostile human imagination in the person of an old literary polecat, an aged book-skunk. Of course if I could decorate my style after the manner of your highly creative gentlemen, I might say that you had unwarily crossed the nocturnal path of his touchy moonlit mephitic highness. I am not surprised, of course, that this letter has caused you to think still more highly of its writer. I tell you that is your profession--to tinker--to turn reality into something better than reality. Some day I expect to see you emerge from your shop with a fish story. Intending buyers will find that you have entered deeply into the ideals and difficulties of the man-eating shark: how he could not swim freely for whales in his track and could not breathe freely for minnows in his mouth; how he got pinched from behind by the malice of the lobster and got shocked on each side by the eccentricities of the eel. The other fish did not appreciate him and he grew embittered--and then only began to bite. You will make over the actual shark and exhibit him to your reader as the ideal shark--a kind of beloved disciple of the sea, the St. John of fish.