"There is the hum of the hive in that phrase, old boy! I'm sure you've been working up to it all along. Come now, confess, you've had that in hand for some little time." "Well, what if I have? That is what writers do, and they have to do it. How else can they make their dialogue in the least attractive? Did you ever write a story, Jack?" "No, of course not; how perfectly absurd!" "Not in the least absurd. You've been reading novels ever since you were born. You've the knack of the thing, the telling of a story, the developing of a plot, the final wind-up of the whole concern, right at your tongue's end." "Paul, you're an idiot." "Idiot, Jack? I'm nothing of the sort and I can prove what I've just been saying to you about yourself. Now, listen and don't interrupt me until I've said my say." Paul caught hold of a branch of vine close at hand and set his hammock swinging slowly. Miss. Juno settled herself more comfortably in hers, and seemed much interested and amused. "Now," said Paul, with a comical air of importance--"now, any one who has anything at his tongue's end, has it, or _can_, just as well as not, have it at his finger's end. If you can tell a story well, and you can, Jack, you know you can, you can write it just as well. You have only to tell it with your pen instead of with your lips; and if you will only write it exactly as you speak it, so long as your verbal version is a good one, your pen version is bound to be equally as good; moreover, it seems to me that in this way one is likely to adopt the most natural style, which is, of course, the best of all styles. Now what do you say to that?" "Oh, nothing," after a little pause--"however I doubt that any one, male or female, can take up pen for the first time and tell a tale like a practised writer." "Of course not. The practised writer has a style of his own, a conventional narrative style which may be very far from nature. People in books very seldom talk as they do in real life. When people in books begin to talk like human beings the reader thinks the dialogue either commonplace or mildly realistic, and votes it a bore." "Then why try to write as one talks? Why not cultivate the conventional style of the practised writer?" "Why talk commonplaces?" cried Paul a little tartly. "Of course most people must do so if they talk at all, and they are usually the people who talk all the time. But I have known people whose ordinary conversation was extraordinary, and worth putting down in a book--every word of it." "In my experience," said Miss. Juno, "people who talk like books are a burden." "They needn't talk like the conventional book, I tell you. Let them have something to say and say it cleverly--that is the kind of conversation to make books of." "What if all that we've been saying here, under the rose, as it were, were printed just as we've said it?"