But of “The Nature of a Crime” no phrase at all suggests either the tones of a voice or the colour of a day. When an old friend, last year, on a Parisian Boulevard said: “Isn’t there a story by yourself and Collaborator buried in the So & So?” I repudiated the idea with a great deal of heat. Eventually I had to admit the, as it were, dead fact. And, having admitted that to myself, and my Collaborator having corroborated it, I was at once possessed by a sort of morbid craving to get the story re-published in a definitive and acknowledged form. One may care infinitely little for the fate of one’s work and yet be almost hypochondriacally anxious as to the form its publication shall take--if the publication is likely to occur posthumously. I became at once dreadfully afraid that some philologist of that Posterity for which one writes, might, in the course of his hyena occupations, disinter these poor bones and, attributing sentence one to writer A and sentence two to B, maul at least one of our memories. With the nature of _those_ crimes one is only too well acquainted. Besides, though one may never read comments one desires to get them over. It is indeed agreeable to hear a storm rage in the distance and rumble eventually away. Let me, however, since my Collaborator wishes it and in the name of Fun that is to-day hardly an echo, differ from him for a shade as to the nature of those passages of time. I protest against the word: quarrels. There were not any. And I should like to make the note that our collaboration was almost purely oral. We wrote and read aloud the one to the other. Possibly in the end we even wrote _to_ read aloud the one to the other: for it strikes me very forcibly that “The Nature of a Crime” is for the most part prose meant for recitation, or of that type. Anyhow, as the memory comes back to me overwhelmingly, I would read on and read on. One begins with a fine propulsion. Sometimes that would last to the end. But, as often as not, by a real telepathy, with my eyes on the page and my voice going on I would grow aware of an exaggerated stillness on the part of my Collaborator in the shadows. It was an extraordinary kind of stillness: not of death: not of an ice age. Yes, it was the stillness of a prisoner on the rack determined to conceal an agony. I would read on, my voice gradually sticking to my jaws. When it became unbearable I would glance up. On the other side of the hearth I would have a glimpse of a terribly sick man, of a convulsed face, of fingers contorted. Guido Fawkes beneath the _peine forte et dure_ looked like that. You are to remember that we were very serious about writing. I would read on. After a long time it would come: “Oh!... Oh, oh!... Oh my God.... My dear Ford.... My dear faller....” (That in those days was the fashionable pronunciation of “fellow”.)