DEAREST H.-- ...I've been so overwhelmed with work, and the mountain of the _Unread_ has piled up so, that only in these days here have I really been able to settle down to your "American Scene," which in its peculiar way seems to me _supremely great_. You know how opposed your whole "third manner" of execution is to the literary ideals which animate my crude and Orson-like breast, mine being to say a thing in one sentence as straight and explicit as it can be made, and then to drop it forever; yours being to avoid naming it straight, but by dint of breathing and sighing all round and round it, to arouse in the reader who may have had a similar perception already (Heaven help him if he hasn't!) the illusion of a solid object, made (like the "ghost" at the Polytechnic) wholly out of impalpable materials, air, and the prismatic interferences of light, ingeniously focused by mirrors upon empty space. But you _do_ it, that's the queerness! And the complication of innuendo and associative reference on the enormous scale to which you give way to it does so _build out_ the matter for the reader that the result is to solidify, by the mere bulk of the process, the like perception from which _he_ has to start. As air, by dint of its volume, will weigh like a corporeal body; so his own poor little initial perception, swathed in this gigantic envelopment of suggestive atmosphere, grows like a germ into something vastly bigger and more substantial. But it's the rummest method for one to employ systematically as you do nowadays; and you employ it at your peril. In this crowded and hurried reading age, pages that require such close attention remain unread and neglected. You can't skip a word if you are to get the effect, and 19 out of 20 worthy readers grow intolerant. The method seems perverse: "Say it _out_, for God's sake," they cry, "and have done with it." And so I say now, give us _one_ thing in your older directer manner, just to show that, in spite of your paradoxical success in this unheard-of method, you _can_ still write according to accepted canons. Give us that interlude; and then continue like the "curiosity of literature" which you have become. For gleams and innuendoes and felicitous verbal insinuations you are unapproachable, but the _core_ of literature is solid. Give it to us _once_ again! The bare perfume of things will not support existence, and the effect of solidity you reach is but perfume and simulacrum.